The US Supreme Court today declined to hear DISH Network’s appeal of TiVo’s patent victory, effectively upholding the ruling. DISH Network will now pay TiVo $104 million, the amount awarded by the jury in 2006 plus interest, which has been held in escrow during the appeals process.

TiVo issued the following statement:

“We are extremely pleased that the United States Supreme Court has denied EchoStar’s petition to review the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit unanimous ruling that upheld the District Court judgment of willful patent infringement, full award of damages, and a permanent injunction against EchoStar’s infringing DVR products. We look forward to the expeditious receipt of damages awarded by the District Court covering the period through September 8, 2006 and remain confident that the District Court will enforce the injunction and award further damages from EchoStar’s continued infringement of our Time Warp patent.”

DISH Network and EchoStar issued their own statement a short time later:

“As expected, the Supreme Court denied our petition for certiorari today.

The Supreme Court’s decision, however, does not impact our software design-around, which has been placed in DISH DVRs subject to the district court’s injunction, and our customers can continue using their DISH DVRs. We believe that the design-around does not infringe Tivo’s patent and that Tivo’s pending motion for contempt should be denied. We look forward to that ruling in the near future.

Because of the Supreme Court’s decision, we will pay Tivo approximately $104 million (the amount the jury awarded in 2006 plus interest). The money is in an escrow account and will be released to Tivo in the next few days.”

This is not the end however, the US District Court in Texas has yet to rule on additional damages as well as the injunction. TiVo claims that DISH Network continued to infringe after the initial award, and indeed continues to infringe, and therefore TiVo is entitled to additional damages. Further they claim that the DISH Network DVRs are subject to the injunction that is part of the initial ruling, upheld today, and therefore must be switched off.

DISH Network for their part claim that a software ‘design around’ they deployed following the ruling makes their DVRs no longer infringing, and hence means there should be no additional damages and, more importantly, that their DVRs are not subject to the injunction.

So depending on how Judge David Folsom decides in Texas this could be the end, or DISH Network could be facing additional payouts and potentially needing to disable millions of DVRs in the field. (Personally I don’t think it’ll come to that. If they’re ordered to switch them off I expect an 11th hour deal with TiVo to license the patents to keep them on.)

But today’s decision does seem to finally be the beginning of the end for this long legal saga.

Disclaimer: I’m employed by Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar.

I haven’t seen much from XStreamHD since I saw them at CES back in January. Though, while I don’t think they’re going to hit their 4Q08 ship date, based on the lack of any product updates, it looks like they’re still out there working on their product. Design & Reuse reports that XStreamHD has just licensed audio processing technology from ARC International to support decoding of Dolby Digital Plus. And checking XStreamHD’s press page it looks like they added members to the executive team in May, and licensed SATA IP tech in June. Not really any indication of what kind of progress, if any, is being made toward bringing their product to market, but signs of life at least.

Picked up from EngadgetHD.

This weekend Amazon VOD brings the $0.99 sale back to frightening levels with the Scary Movie Sale. Ten titles each $0.99 to rent: John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Forgotten, Asylum, Beetlejuice, Twilight Zone: The Movie, fear dot com, The Eye 2, The Nun, and Candyman 2: Farewell To The Flesh.

Or anyone’s Moxi? I specifically mean the Digeo Moxi 3012 which was supposed to be be distributed to consumers by Charter by the end of 3Q08. Here we are in the fourth quarter and as best I can determine Charter is not yet shipping the Moxi 3012 to consumers and no further announcement has been made. At best it seems it may be in the hands of a handful of Charter employees. Anyone out there have one of these mythical beasts yet? Someone who doesn’t work for Digeo or Charter? For a company so fond of announcements and releases I can’t believe they started shipping without telling anyone about it.

(No, I didn’t really expect them to ship, but I was kind of hoping they would because I’d like to see them deliver on a promise someday. And yes, I was feeling snarky.)

I normally don’t post personal stuff on this blog, but I just had to share this.

I just turned on my TiVo Series3. I watched a TiVoCast program and it was fine. Then I went to play another and it started but stuttered a lot. I tried it a few times and it didn’t work right. So I tried another, same thing. I went to Live TV and it seemed to be OK, but then that locked up for a bit too. I’ve had weirdness before fixed by a restart, so I restarted the box. Live TV seemed to be OK, but the TiVoCast content still wouldn’t play. Then I tried normal recordings, same thing, even on recordings from days ago. Uh oh. And I thought I heard something.

So I got down by the unit, and I heard a clicking. Clicking is not good. I determined that the clicking was coming from the 500GB My DVR Expander connected to the TiVo. That’s definitely not good. I checked the connections and restarted again. And it told me the external device wasn’t connected. I rechecked and restarted again, same error. I knew it was hopeless but I tried a few more times anyway. Nope, my external drive just died. Click of Death. This is the second 500GB WD SATA drive I’ve had die in the past couple of months. I had one in a USB enclosure for my PC that also died, also with the Click of Death, and it was even younger.

So now I’m restarting the TiVo without it, and I know that means I’m going to lose recordings. Of course normally I’m caught right up with my recordings so I’d only lose a day or so. But no, this had to happen when I’ve been unusually busy and have a couple of weeks worth of programs, including the season premiers of several shows (Heroes, for example) unwatched. Not to mention shows that won’t repeat any time soon (a couple of weeks of Code Geass and Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, for example). Oh yeah, it just finished and just about everything is gone - all that’s left is a handful of TiVoCasts that must have been 100% on the internal drive by chance. Even all the suggestions are gone.

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, since I have a Series2 in my bedroom that I have mirror my season passes, only without anything set to Keep Until I Delete, for just such an emergency. Normally. But, of course, that unit had started exhibiting a weird issue where the on-screen Guide would be fine, but the scheduler would be complaining it was running out of data. Like this morning the scheduler was complaining it’d be out by 10/7, but the on-screen guide went out to 10/12. I figure this was database corruption and everything else I’ve tried didn’t fix it, so, since it was only my backup unit, I took drastic action. Can you guess what I did? Yeah, less that 12 hours ago I did a Clear and Delete Everything. So all my ‘backup’ recordings? Gone too.

I’m so very happy at this moment.

Some of the content I might be able to grab from sites like Hulu, some I might be able to buy from Amazon VOD, but I’m just SOL on a lot of it.

I doubt there is any warranty on the My DVR Expander either.

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Long suffering UK TiVo users have taken another blow, their units have stopped offering TiVo Suggestions. The UK users have operated for years without the availability of new hardware or even any software updates. Their Series1 units still run software release 2.5, behind even the US Series1 units. And now TiVo Suggestions has stopped working as well.

This appears to be linked to a changed in the format of the guide data, according to a post by TiVoPony over at TiVoCommunity. Apparently the data format ran out of room for new program IDs and TMS had to expand the format. The suggestions feature in the old 2.5 software is tied to the native TMS data format, and the change in the DB format has broken the feature. It would take a software update to fix, and according to TiVoPony “an update for those boxes is not in the cards.” So it sounds like this is a permanent loss.

Hopefully the rumors of TiVo re-launching in the UL with DVB-T hardware are true and the TiVo faithful will have another option soon. (It would be nice of TiVo to offer some kind of upgrade incentive discount for those who’ve stuck with the Series1 unit all this time.) And with Nero LiquidTV | TiVo PC launching in Europe in 2009, that may be another option for the TiVo faithful in the UK.

Picked up from BLORGE.

Smarthouse reports that Seven Network is ready to begin offering the 500GB eSATA add-on drive for the Australian TiVo. The description given in their report seems to imply that it may be more locked down than in the US:

“The storage device will be exclusive to the TiVo and will record HD Television. Consumers will not be able to attach the device to other computers or recorders. The TiVo software will automatically see the device and record to it when the storage built into the device is full”.

In the US, of course, it is a standard Western Digital 500GB eSATA My DVR Expander, and the same drive works with Scientific Atlanta cable DVRs as well as with any PC that supports eSATA. Now, this could simply be the ‘Seven Media insider’ who was talking to Smarthouse not knowing that they were talking about. It is true that once you attach a drive to the TiVo it is formatted for the TiVo and you cannot them connect it to another device without reformatting it. But eSATA is eSATA and the drive can be reformatted and reused. I tend to suspect that will actually be the case in Australia too.

Smarthouse also says Seven is set to roll out the TiVo to other retailers, now that Harvey Norman’s three month exclusive is up, including retailer Dick Smith. (What is it with Australian retailers and guys names?) Retailer JB Hi Fi CEO Richard Uechtritz says they still haven’t decided if they will stock TiVo.

Interestingly this story comes just one day after Smarthouse posted a rumor mongering story entitled “Is Seven Media Set To Dump Tivo?” In that story they claimed that ‘Seven Media insiders’ told them that sales through Harvey Norman failed to hit targets and that they were now ‘reviewing their options’. They also said it was “slammed by reviewers.” And pulled this bit from the Australian PC Magazine:

PC Magazine wrote “unlike its US counterpart, the Aussie TiVo is a crippled box. Shipping with a 160GB HD, the TiVo allows you to record up to a pathetic 32 hours of HD or 62 of SD television.

Having personally read a lot of reviews of the Australian TiVo, I have to wonder about the agenda behind this particular Smarthouse article. The reviews of the Australian TiVo have been overwhelmingly positive. Yes, there are issues, and probably the primary one is the hard drive size. But APC was also off base saying it was ‘crippled’ compared to the US box - it has the same 160GB drive. It has lacked the option for eSATA expansion available in the US, but, as above, that’s coming. And calling 32 hours of HD ‘pathetic’? A wee bit of hyperbole. That’s more recording time than the original TiVo models had at all. And more than the TiVo HD has in the US (we tend to have higher bitrates, apparently.) And most users are happy with it. I remember reading that APC ‘review’ when it first appeared, particularly because it was probably the single harshest review of the lot and the only one that I recall being wholly negative. It seemed like the author started out looking for reasons to slam the TiVo. It read more like a rant than a review.

Smarthouse goes on to say “A key problem for Seven Media is content and the emergence of IPTV which will allow consumers to download movies and other content to a HD TV screen.” Yet the author doesn’t say why this is a problem. This is odd, especially since Seven Network has stated that this is specifically not a problem, quite the opposite, since the TiVo will also server as their IPTV gateway into the home. It struck me as very strange that the author would lay this out as a problem with nothing to support the argument when Seven’s stated plans for TiVo include broadband content delivery and IPTV features.

Smarthouse then goes on to talk about Nero’s LiquidTV and declares it a threat to Seven’s TiVo offering. But while they mention it goes on sale October 15th, they fail to mention that’s only in the US, Canada, and Mexico. And really, those who will opt for an HTPC are mostly a different market from those who will opt for an STB. LiquidTV | TiVo PC is no more a thread to Seven’s TiVo box than it is a threat to standalone TiVos in the US - basically none. And that, of course, hinges on some future launch of a version for Australia. The North American version won’t do any good as you need an EPG feed to use it.

The whole article just seemed like sensationalism without any real evidence to back it up, just rumors and unfounded speculation.