With the change, the company said in a statement provided to Multichannel News, it will shift resources to support “EchoStar’s unique intellectual property and advanced content-delivery technologies.” The company owns Sling Media, developer of the Slingbox device, and acquired the adaptive bit-rate technology of Move Technologies last year for $45 million.

However, EchoStar said it “remains firmly committed to supplying advanced hardware, software, and system solutions to its global cable, satellite, and telecom customers outside of the U.S. cable set top box market.”

“EchoStar recognizes that the highly demanding and competitive nature of the U.S. set-top market is very cost-competitive,” the company said. “After considerable review of the market and EchoStar’s sales/product development efforts, EchoStar has concluded the U.S. cable market offers insufficient revenue return opportunities to the company and our investors.”

That’s good news for TiVo, as Aria had the potential to be a serious competitor, especially with small-to-medium MSOs, if EchoStar was able to execute. EchoStar certainly knows how to make DVRs; something like a CableCARD version of DISH Network’s Hopper could’ve been quite a strong whole-home product. The death of Aria removes a potential competitor from the field, and really effectively leaves only ARRIS’s Moxi lineup to compete with TiVo for the small-to-medium market. The larger MSO market is dominated by traditional players like Motorola and Cisco, though TiVo has made inroads there with the likes of Charter.

This is actually a very nice system, and one of the few things I’m envious of as a TiVo user. I use an external Slingbox with my TiVo, but that’s really a but if a kludge with analog A/V connections and IR blasters. The DISH Sling Adapter connects with a simple USB cable, and that’s all. TiVo’s forthcoming transcoder box will provide a similarly elegant solution via a single network connection, even moreso as it can support multiple DVRs with one box. However, initially at least, it will only stream within the home. I really hope TiVo comes around and adds true place shifting for streaming outside of the home as well. Then I’d gladly replace my Slingbox.

Three tuners, but it can record up to six HD channels at once? What kind of dark voodoo is this? Well, note the asterisk: “*DURING PRIMETIME HOURS”. And now note this from the quote above “ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC”. How it manages this trick is actually pretty simple, but requires a little explanation.

I’ll oversimplify a bit, but for analog broadcast TV you have one channel per frequency. A tuner did just that – it tuned a given frequency and therefore a program. But with digital content frequencies and channels have a more nebulous relationship. A single frequency block may contain several digital channels all multiplexed, or MUXed, together. And this is precisely how satellite works. They can’t use a dedicated transponder and frequency for each channel, rather channels are MUXed together. So ‘tuning’ a single channel is actually a multi-step process.

First the tuner tunes the desired frequency and this allows the unit to receive the data stream that is the MUX. Normally the next step is that the signal is de-MUXed and the desired channel is extracted, with the other data being discarded. This one channel is then saved to the drive as a recording. Can you see where I’m going?

Since DISH controls everything end to end, what they’ve done is place ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in one MUX. And instead of de-MUXing the data as it is received they’re saving the entire MUX to the drive, all four channels. Then it is de-MUXed at playback time, not record time. That’s how it can record up to six channels with three tuners. You have one tuner recording the MUX, for four channels, and two tuners each recording a single channel.

But this is limited. As the page states, they do this during prime time hours only. And recording four channels takes up four times the space, even if you’re never going to watch all four channels. The Hopper has a 2TB drive, but only half is available for user recordings – up to 250 hours. The other half is used to store these PrimeTime Anytime MUX recordings, as well as pre-cached OnDemand content pushed the the box. And you can’t record up to six programs you select, you can only record up to three individual programs. Or two programs while the third tuner is occupied recording this MUX.

So you can record any three channels or the four-channel prime time MUX of the major networks and any two other channels – which is how they get six total. And it only does this during prime time, 8-11pm Eastern, so you won’t be doing this for day time programming, etc.

In addition to this PrimeTime AnyTime feature, the Hopper also supports TV Anywhere place shifting with the Sling Adapter add-on.

Last week DISH launched a new YouTube channel and they’ve gone on a tear uploading videos – most of which have to do with the Hopper. They do provide some useful product info:

They even have a couple of TV spots for it, though I’m not really sure if I should be amused or offended seeing as I currently live in central MA and my wife is from South Boston. And no, she does not have this accent:

They’ve even uploaded videos from the launch at CES:

But it seems it has fallen apart, and CableOne has pulled Aria out of trials, as reported by Light Reading. But what is bad news for EchoStar could be good news for TiVo:

CableOne’s interest in EchoStar, Charlie Ergen’s technology and set-top box outfit, goes back a bit. EchoStar and TiVo Inc. were among the companies the MSO was looking at in mid-2010, when CableOne was mulling its next-gen video service strategy. TiVo has once again emerged as “a very strong candidate” for that business, a source says. Motorola Mobility Inc. remains CableOne’s primary digital set-top and security vendor.

Things have changed since mid-2010, TiVo now has a proven track record with deployments at RCN, Suddenlink, Grande Communications, and Charter. Including the ability to rapidly deploy with a new operator, proven with the short turn around time on the Grande deal. CableOne falls right between RCN and Suddenlink in size, so it would be right in TiVo’s sweet spot.

Via Light Reading.

The Hopper is only a three tuner DVR, which seems kind of meager given AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FiOS, and TiVo all have four tuner units, the DirecTV HR34 has five tuners, and Arris has a six tuner Moxi DVR available for cable MSOs. Especially as the Joey boxes rely on the tuners in the Hopper for live TV. However, the Hopper does have one unique trick up its sleeve – PrimeTime Anytime:

The Hopper’s exclusive feature, PrimeTime Anytime, gives you instant On Demand access to your favorite shows on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in HD. Over three hours per night of HD primetime programming are available to you On Demand anytime for up to eight days from the initial air date.

How does it manage this trick? Well, you may notice the product page states:

The Hopper is a three–tuner Whole–Home HD DVR that lets you record up to six HD channels at once* and play them back from any room in your home.

Three tuners, but it can record up to six HD channels at once? What kind of dark voodoo is this? Well, note the asterisk:“*DURING PRIMETIME HOURS”. And now note this from the quote above“ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC”. How it manages this trick is actually pretty simple, but requires a little explanation.

I’ll oversimplify a bit, but for analog broadcast TV you have one channel per frequency. A tuner did just that – it tuned a given frequency and therefore a program. But with digital content frequencies and channels have a more nebulous relationship. A single frequency block may contain several digital channels all multiplexed, or MUXed, together. And this is precisely how satellite works. They can’t use a dedicated transponder and frequency for each channel, rather channels are MUXed together. So ‘tuning’ a single channel is actually a multi-step process.

First the tuner tunes the desired frequency and this allows the unit to receive the data stream that is the MUX. Normally the next step is that the signal is de-MUXed and the desired channel is extracted, with the other data being discarded. This one channel is then saved to the drive as a recording. Can you see where I’m going?

Since DISH controls everything end to end, what they’ve done is place ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in one MUX. And instead of de-MUXing the data as it is received they’re saving the entire MUX to the drive, all four channels. Then it is de-MUXed at playback time, not record time. That’s how it can record up to six channels with three tuners. You have one tuner recording the MUX, for four channels, and two tuners each recording a single channel.

But this is limited. As the page states, they do this during prime time hours only. And recording four channels takes up four times the space, even if you’re never going to watch all four channels. The Hopper has a 2TB drive, but only half is available for user recordings – up to 250 hours. The other half is used to store these PrimeTime Anytime MUX recordings, as well as pre-cached OnDemand content pushed the the box. And you can’t record up to six programs you select, you can only record up to three individual programs. Or two programs while the third tuner is occupied recording this MUX. It isn’t clear what happens if you want to record three programs not on these four networks during prime time. Does it only allow you to schedule two recordings? Or does it not record the mux and thus not offer the PrimeTime Anytime content for that night? I suspect the former.

It is a clever trick, but it clearly has some limitations. I’d rather have more tuners at my disposal.

The Hopper does offer Blockbuster OnDemand via broadband, not surprising since DISH purchased Blockbuster. It also has SiriusXM Radio, which is a nice feature for those who subscribe. And while the Hopper is not SlingLoaded, like the ViP922, it is compatible with the USB Sling Adapter, like the ViP722. So you can add the Sling Adapter to enable place shifting. That is a nice feature.

What about MoCA? Well, that’s how the Hopper and Joey units work together to provide the whole-home DVR. MoCA is the new industry standard for whole-home DVRs. It is being widely adopted by cable MSOs, CE vendors such as TiVo, and satellite. DirecTV is also using MoCA for their whole-home streaming. (And before you leave a comment and ‘correct’ me by saying they use DECA, read this post.) I suspect DISH is using Mid-RF MoCA, just like DirecTV.

Overall the Hopper & Joey look like the best DISH Network has to offer, and worthy of being flagship products. However, I think they would’ve been better off bringing a DVR with more tuners to market rather than playing games with the MUX recording for prime time content. There’s no reason they couldn’t do both.

The user still has to request specific recordings, and a separate copy is kept for every user. If you and ten of your neighbors record the same program, eleven copies are kept on the head end. While this is inefficient and, frankly, stupid, from a technical standpoint, it is due to legal requirements. Cablevision is deploying nDVRs in some of their territories in NY and CT. They were sued by content providers over the nDVR – and won. But the ruling hinges on the fact that the nDVR works just like a ‘normal’ DVR with each user recording their own content. The functionality is the same, only the storage has moved from the customer’s home to the central office. Making one copy and providing access to multiple users would be redistribution, legally, and is a no-no. Hopefully someday the law will catch up to reality, but I’m not holding my breath.

There is one point in the Light Reading article reporting on this that I’m not sure I agree with:

That means EchoStar’s system will be built to store the individual programs a given customer sets to record, and won’t back up that data. So if a hard drive fails, all of the recorded content on that drive goes poof.

My understanding is that, while the ruling does require separate recordings for each user and would not allow backups, it doesn’t forbid using modern storage technology such as RAID. Indeed, there are some home DVRs that use RAID today. For the non-geeks, RAID is Redundant Array of Independent Drives. To over-simplify, picture to physical hard drives acting as one logical drive, with two copies of everything – one copy per drive. You only have the storage capacity of one drive, but you have redundancy – if one physical drive fails you don’t lose any data, it is safely on the other drive. And you can swap out the dead drive, copy everything over, and restore redundancy with nothing being lost. Since I’m sure EchoStar’s system will be using commercial grade storage arrays at the central office I’d be a bit surprised if they didn’t use some form of RAID or the equivalent.

Beyond the possibility of offering some form of redundancy, there are also economies of scale. Since a storage array will be shared across many users, even with redundant recordings the total raw storage space required to support a number of users, for the same number of recordings, is less than with individual drives in every home. It just works out to be a more efficient distribution with less wasted space. The environment in a data center is likely to be better for the drives than the average home too – clean, reliable power, good environmental controls, minimal vibration, etc. And since the recordings are already in the ‘cloud’, and EchoStar is of course the owner of placeshifting pioneer Sling Media, I would expect them to include the ability to stream your recordings to other devices. And that would be without requiring you to buy a Slingbox or use your broadband connection to send the data out of your home.

EchoStar says they’ll deliver the nDVR to their first customer by the end of 2012. While sister company Dish Network normally gets first dibs on new EchoStar products, I’m not sure that will be true this time. The problem with nDVRs is that they require sending different streams, possibly multiple streams, to every home. Imagine watching one show in the living room, while three other household members watch other recordings in other rooms. That’s four data streams into your home. Now all of your neighbors are doing the same. Satellite doesn’t do this well, it is best suited for sending the same content into multiple homes because of the fixed number of transponders. Even satellite data systems are more bandwidth limited than cable, fiber, or even DSL systems. They could have something tricky up their sleeves, like a wireless data play for delivery, but I think it is more likely that this will show up with a cable MSO. Very likely a second tier MSO looking for a technical edge, much as RCN & Suddenlink have turned to TiVo.

And speaking of TiVo, many view the nDVR as a threat to TiVo as their business has been built around placing ‘conventional’ DVRs into homes. But I disagree. TiVo’s main selling point is their UI, not the fact that the hard drive is in the STB. TiVo could just as easily split their product and create an nDVR. In fact, something like the TiVo Preview could easily be the STB client for an nDVR system. Right now it is designed to stream from a DVR in the home, but that data stream could just as easily be delivered into the home from remote storage. Exactly the same way OTT content is delivered to TiVo today. If demand for nDVRs takes off I’m sure we’ll see an nDVR from TiVo. The Virgin Media TiVo in the UK already has a DOCSIS modem and it looks like the upcoming 16.x software includes DOCSIS support, which could be hinting at future US products as well. And there is MoCA as well, which could communicate with an MSO gateway unit. Saying ‘data is data’ is a bit simplistic, but not too far off the mark.

In any case, it will be interesting to see if EchoStar gets more traction with their nDVR than they’ve achieved with their SlingLoaded cable products to date.

Via Light Reading.

I said a while back I’d get around to writing up the reasons for why this blog went on hiatus for over two years and this seems like a good time for that. It is no coincidence that it started shortly after the events in the previous post. Getting fired over them was a complete and utter shock, and it shook me up. Of course it meant I had to scramble to look for a new job. It also left me pretty pissed off, frustrated, and depressed. And, understandably I think, a bit gun shy about social media, blogs, and forums. If you look back I posted 37 posts in January 2009. I posted nothing at all in February, I was in a bad way. I tried to get back on the horse with a post in March and nine posts in April, but my heart just wasn’t in it and it was a struggle to post even that much. I made one small post in October, and then one post each in July and August of 2010, and that’s it until I relaunched in July of this year with 88 posts. I guess I’m back.

This is going to get very long, so I’ll cut here…

Now, I should tell the whole story and back up a bit. One of the things that contributed to my being fired over this was probably that I was almost fired for something similar less than a month earlier. I say probably because I don’t really know for sure. As some of you may recall, just after CES 2009 ended, several of the original founders of Sling Media announced they were leaving, including Blake Krikorian. I was actually still in Las Vegas when that happened, flying home that day. That morning I got a call from my manager to tell me the news. Apparently they’d called an all-hands meeting in the office to let everyone know. She was shocked and frazzled, and it seemed like things were kind of chaotic there, so the call wasn’t long. I went on with my day and caught my shuttle to the airport.

On the ride to the airport I was reading Twitter and checking out blogs on my Treo. As I recall I saw a tweet from Om Malik about a new blog post, and went and read the post. It was about Blake and crew leaving Sling. There were other posts up with quotes from Blake about his departure. In other words the news was out and public, and absolutely confirmed by the man himself. At that point I tweeted something along the lines of “Just heard Blake Krikorian is leaving Sling. That sucks.” Something like that, I tried to find it but couldn’t seem to go back that far in Twitter. I didn’t think anything of it, the news was all over. I just shared how I was feeling.

Well, just after I got the the airport I got a frantic call from my boss asking me what the heck I’d done. People in upper management were calling for my head. I had no idea, but it turned out to be the tweet. So I deleted it immediately, for what good that does. It seems that at the meeting, which I wasn’t at remember, they’d told everyone not to say a word about the departure until EchoStar had made an official statement confirming it. And they still hadn’t done so. So they want to fire me for the tweet for leaking news – which was already all over the net. I was dumbstruck by the very idea.

Their rational was that I should’ve just known not to say anything, even though I was reading about the news already and Blake himself had commenting publicly. Nothing I said was going to matter, it wasn’t like I was revealing any secret or confirming any rumors. The horses were gone and the barn had burned to the ground. Everywhere else I’ve worked the common sense rule has been that you don’t mention things that are internal only, and you don’t confirm any rumors, etc. But if hard information is out in the open then it is ridiculous to expect people to have to pretend it isn’t.

In the end I had to grovel and apologize profusely verbally and in writing, but I managed to keep my job. I found the whole situation kind of bizarre, but I didn’t realize it was foreshadowing what was to come.

All of this time I’d been Sling’s official unofficial representative on Sling Community. Sling’s relationship with Sling Community was kind of weird. They didn’t own it, it was run by Capable Networks. But I had a regular call with Capable Networks to keep them in the loop on what was going on with Sling, to give them a heads up. And we had a few blogs on the site, one of which I contributed to. I was also the one Sling employee truly active in the forums, constantly fielding questions, offering support, etc. Within Sling I regularly had managers and the like thanking me for dealing with some issue in the forums before it got out of hand, handling some support issue, etc. So lots of people knew what I was doing and approved of it, but it wasn’t an official thing. Part of that whole arms length relationship.

The post I made that got me fired wasn’t really any different than countless other posts I’d made over the course of the year I worked for Sling. And that’s what made it such a shock to me. Everything I said in the post about Sling’s plans were things I’d said previously – and the official reason I was given for my termination was that I’d announced company plans without the authority to do so. What I shared were items the product managers had told me it was OK to share previously. But I didn’t have official authorization, so it didn’t count.

The final conversation in which I was fired still bugs me. Basically it boiled down to me needing official written approval for every thing I said on the forums. Each individual post. Which makes no damn sense. If you have someone posting on forums like that you can’t have them asking for approval on every post or they’ll never post anything. You can’t participate in a community if you’re too tied up in red tape. My feeling is that it reflected the shift in management. Sling’s original management got social media. They understood the value of the community and the give and take it required, and they were willing to risk a few slips because it was worth it. But EchoStar’s management was the opposite, they didn’t like the idea of anyone who wasn’t an official corporate mouthpiece saying anything to anyone. That’s evidenced by them subsequently buying out Sling Community for the express purpose of shutting it down and launching a highly censored, support-only board.

I remain convinced that if I’d made that post before the change in management things would’ve played out differently, and I don’t think I would’ve been terminated. But that’s alternate history and what happened happened and there is no changing it.

Losing the job at Sling hit me especially had because it was contending for position as my favorite job ever at that point. I loved what I was doing as a Beta Program Manager. At the time we had several cool projects going that I was involved in. I was mainly running betas for SlingPlayer Mobile, but I was also involved with the Slingbox PRO-HD, and I was looking forward to the iPhone and Android programs. I was working out of my home, and I got on great with my manager (whom I’m still in touch with and consider a friend – she actually came to me about working for her) and my colleagues. I loved the community of users on Sling Community and was glad to be part of it. I was considering moving back to California to work in the home office. And I’d just returned from working Sling’s booth at CES, which I thought had gone very well. I was riding high and thought things were going great.

So when I had the rug pulled out from underneath me I crashed pretty hard. Fortunately I was in an OK position financially to be able to make it until I found work and I found a new job pretty quickly due to the Small World Factor. The manager who hired me was someone I’d worked with back in 2001 at a different job when I was a consultant. Due to my unique name when he saw my resume hit his inbox he remembered me immediately and I got the job. When I applied I had no idea he was with the company I was applying to, let alone the manager for the position. That was just dumb luck.

The job was doing IT for a hosting company, but it meant working the night shift (11-8, midnight-9) and I had an hour commute each way. I also tended to end up putting in a lot of extra time, so I’d often be leaving work at noon. And I was the only night guy, so it was a fairly lonely, isolating job. So my work days were effectively longer and I was tired most of the time (the overnight shift is tough on the body and mind). The anger and frustration faded fairly quickly, but the depression set in for a long while. I pretty much fell off the net. I didn’t just stop blogging, I stopped reading blogs, web comics, LiveJournal, etc. My heart just wasn’t in it.

But there was more to it than just that. In one of the last posts I’d made I mentioned that’d I developed a problem with my left hand. I woke up one day at CES 2009 and the outside of my left hand was numb – the pinky, half of the ring finger, and the outer part of the hand down to the wrist were pins and needles. I figured I’d slept on it wrong, but by the end of the day it wasn’t any better. Nor the next day. Nor the next. In fact, it got worse. I lost an increasing amount of sensation and motor control over those fingers. And the muscles started to atrophy, you could see the difference in my hands. I spent months bouncing between my doctor and various specialists until I was referred to a hand and arm clinic and the doctor there recognized the problem instantly.

The ulnar nerve is the nerve that gives you your ‘funny bone’. It runs from the neck down the outside of the arm, around the outside of the elbow, and down to the hand. It carries the signals for the portion of the hand I was having trouble with. Somehow the sheath around the nerve had become irritated and inflamed, and was putting pressure on the nerve. The problem is this has negative feedback. The inflammation pinches the nerve, which means it can’t slide in the sheath and every time you bend your arm it tugs on the nerve and irritates it and the surrounding tissue. Which makes it inflamed. Which pinches the nerve. Etc.

We tried braces and anti-inflammatories, but it didn’t heal on its own. It caused problems with my typing, and there was some pain, so I saved most of my typing for work. Since I wasn’t feeling all that great about being online to start with, having physical problems typing was just the icing on the cake and was more than enough to keep me away. I eventually had surgery at the end of October, 2009. An ulnar nerve translocation, I believe it is called. Basically they flayed my arm open at the elbow and moved my ulnar nerve from the outside of the elbow to the inside. So now when I bend my arm the nerve isn’t stretched – it is on the inside of the curve not the outside. I was in a case for a little while and I had to take it easy even after that. Then it many months for the nerve to slowly heal on its own, now that the irritation was removed. And I have an awesome scar.

We never did figure out what the exact cause was, but the primary suspect is simple – I lean on that arm. I’m a big guy – 6’6″ tall and, frankly, carry a bit too much weight – around 400#. (When I was in decent shape I was still around 300#. I’m pretty broadly built.) This means most of the world is too small for me – desks, chairs, tables, cars, etc. I’m right handed, so what I find I do, unconsciously, is tuck my left arm across my body as I lean forward. That puts a lot of pressure on my arm, especially at the elbow, as it ends up taking the weight of my torso. I try not to do it, but if I don’t actively think about it I find myself just naturally in that position. We figured it was just a cumulative thing. I leaned on it long enough and eventually it just had too much and got inflamed. And once it was irritated enough the negative feedback loop started. I didn’t feel anything until things hit the tipping point and my hand went numb. By then things were pretty bad.

I’m not back to 100%, and I probably never will be, but I’m at least 95%, maybe more. I have most of the feeling back in my hand and nearly all of the fine control. Typing is back to the way it used to be and there is no more pain. I have a very faint numbness tingle which seems to increase when I’m fatigued, but it is a big improvement over the dead meat feeling I had when it was at its worst. I was constantly jamming my fingers on things because I had no sense of where those two fingers were, especially the pinky.

I kind of lucked out having gotten into a relationship with a nurse just six weeks before my surgery. She was an incredible help in dealing with the recovery. Especially the first days. I had a nerve block as part of the surgery and my arm was completely dead from the shoulder down, and in a cast. No feeling, no control. It just swung around in the sling. Big fun. Without her around to help me out I’m not sure how I would’ve managed.

So all of these things added up to making 2009 a real banner year for me. And I really didn’t feel much like doing anything, let alone blogging. Even if I wanted to it would’ve been hard for me.

It took a while for that feeling to fade and to slowly start reading a few blogs, then some more, getting more active on Facebook (where most of my friends had shifted from LJ while I was out of the loop), etc. I had my first date with my now-fiancee on September 12, 2009 (just before my surgery, as I said above), and that relationship certainly helped improve my life and outlook overall. Of course, I live in Worcester and she lived in Boston which is an hour away, but fortunately not too far from where I worked. She’s a nurse and was also doing a fair bit of night shifts at the time, so we were able to meet up before/after our shifts, etc.

Though it did mean that what little time I had outside of work just shrank, since if I had the option of being with her or surfing around the net reading blogs… well, I’m a geek but I’m not that much of a geek. Not a hard decision to make.

I worked that job for about a year, until early 2010 when an opportunity with F5 networks fell into my lap. The brother of one of my best friends from college worked there and they were looking for someone with my skill set on the east coast. My friend’s brother mentioned it to him, and he thought of me. I wasn’t actively looking at the time, but it sounded like a great gig, so I applied. Long story short, I got the job. Not to knock the company I was working for, but it meant better pay, better benefits, no more commute (working from home again), and the work is much more stimulating for me than data center IT. It just suits me better and I’m better at it. I started my new job on 2/28/10.

It is a senior level position so there was a steep learning curve and a lot of time spent building my skills with the products and getting comfortable for myself – I tend to be pretty demanding of myself professionally. Between six weeks in Seattle for training, and then a few months of learning and adjustment on the job, as well as maintaining my relationship, well, it didn’t leave a lot of time. But my overall mood improved, and my energy levels were much better being off the night shift. So my online activities picked up and I started reading more blogs again, leaving comments, etc. And I started to get the itch to blog again myself. I even started making occasional comments about it here and there.

But I went through the rest of 2010 without really making real moves to get the blog going again. I was focused on my new job and my new relationship. In early September she moved in with me, which was good timing since I’d ordered a ring and I proposed to her on September 12, 2010 – the anniversary of our first date. (Yes, Monday was the anniversary of our engagement, the wedding is February 4, 2012.) I was increasingly active online, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, and also reading and commenting on a number of blogs again. But it was mostly inertia. I’d been out of blogging for so long at that point that I didn’t have the groove. And everything felt out of date, which was discouraging. But I would mention it from time to time and was starting to poke at things behind the scenes by the end of the year.

Come January 2011 and I was seriously thinking of relaunching the blog. I registered giz.lv to use as a custom bit.ly short domain. I knew I wanted to relaunch with a big update to get with the times – Facebook and Twitter integration, the custom short domain, etc. The problem was finding the time to do all the back end work. I didn’t want to promise anything until I knew I had things in a good condition to start over. So I spent the next few months researching software options, updating things on the server, etc. And then there was the final push to upgrade all the software, remove old plugins, add new ones, setup the links with Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal, update, or recreate, my affiliate accounts, and, most important of all, create the new look and feel for the site. While I liked the old look back when I created it, I didn’t think it had aged well and I really wanted something a lot more modern looking.

It was really a matter of finding, or making, the time to do all the grunt work that it takes to setup a blog. It is all the grunt work you don’t want to do but have to in order to get to the fun part – actually blogging. Not that blogging itself isn’t work, but it is a different kind of work.

I still have a lot to do. There are pages on this site with old info that need updating – the TiVo Resources, Support Gizmo Lovers, etc. Lots of broken links to fix (I’ve already fixed a few thousand, around 600 left now…) and other things to clean up. But I’m doing that bit by bit and it’ll get done in time.

In the end I’m almost happy that I got fired when I did. Sling Media has kind of gone downhill, IMHO, under EchoStar’s rule. No new boxes since the PRO-HD. The SlingCatcher came and went. The SOLO-HD that was talked about never happened, nor did the ‘God Box’ combo Slingbox/SlingCatcher. The SlingLoaded products are around but aren’t doing much. EchoStar’s MSO push hasn’t gotten very far. They have continued to update the clients, and I’m glad to see the progress made on the iOS and Android versions, as well as the upcoming clients for Google TV and Boxee. I was arguing for that kind of thing instead of the SlingCatcher back when I worked there. (But that’s maybe another post someday.)

A number of the people I really enjoyed working with left Sling after I was booted, including my manager. I probably would’ve bailed when she did anyway, since she was a big part of why I took the job in the first place. Other people I’ve talked to have indicated that the overall mood and morale isn’t what it used to be. If I had still been at Sling when the F5 opportunity came up I don’t know that I would’ve pursued it. Since I did enjoy working for Sling overall I don’t know that I would’ve felt any desire to apply anywhere else. I really can’t say, since I don’t know what my trajectory would’ve been.

In any case, the fact that I was out of Sling and working a job that I wasn’t really a good fit for put me in a position where I was open to new opportunities. And F5 is, hands down, the best place I’ve ever worked, and this is the best job I’ve ever had. I love the product, I love the people, and I love the work I do. It has its ups and downs, like any job, but most days I have no aversion to going to work. Not that I have a long commute – down the stairs from the bedroom. Which is a nice perk in itself, of course. And even though I work from home I feel less isolated than I did working the night shift in an office. I have daily calls with my team, email, Communicator, etc. I may be on the other side of the country from most of the team, who are in Seattle, but we interact regularly. The physical distance is less isolating than the temporal distance of being on the opposite shift from everyone else.

So things worked out in the end. I got fired, but a year later I landed what seems to be the perfect job for me. I’ve met a wonderful woman who shares my home and we’re engaged to be married. (And she’s motivated me to improve my home – new furniture, etc. Which I actually appreciate.) My health has improved. And my overall attitude and mood is much improved from 2009. I really don’t have much to complain about these days. My fiancee kept encouraging me to get back into blogging. She could tell it was something I enjoyed and missed, but that I needed a bit of nudging to overcome the inertia and finally get on with it again. So I owe her for that.

I’m happy to be blogging again. It feels like a slow slog sometimes, trying to rebuild my audience, but it seems to be happening slowly but surely. It feels a lot like launching the blog did in the first place, though there were a handful of diehards who stuck around through the hiatus. And I’m thankful for that. I’m still kind of finding my footing again, getting my groove back. The more I blog the easier it flows. So I think it is coming back to me. And I’ve gotten used to the changes in the tools I’m using. I have to say things are easier now than the were in 2009. Lots of improvements to WordPress and the plugins I’m using.

I hope you enjoy the new look & feel of the site, as well as the new content. And if you’ve read this whole post… wow, thanks.

So there you have it. I may have forgotten to include something here and there, but I think this is way too long already and it covers the important bits. I’m glad to have all of that behind me now and I hope the future is as bright as the present.

In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.

No more TouchPads, no more Pres, Pixis, Veers, etc. They didn’t kill off the OS itself, technically, but right now it is in a deep coma and not looking well. It remains to be seen if it ever reappears on any phone or tablet devices, or if it ends up as an embedded OS in printers and the like, if even that. HP has talked of licensing it to other companies, or possibly even selling it, but who would buy? It seems like every time another company is rumored as a possibly suitor they rush to say “Not us!”, as if they’re afraid of being tainted by the thought.

WebOS is a two-time failure in the market. Palm couldn’t make a go of it alone, and their ‘savior’, HP, ended up throwing in the towel. Now the market is even more dominated by iOS and Android than when Palm first launched WebOS, or when HP gave it a second try. Anyone wanting to relaunch WebOS would need to spend enormous amounts of money on marketing to displace iOS and Android from the public consciousness. On top of that, Microsoft is poised to do just that to promote Windows Phone Mango. RIM, the long established smartphone vendor, is on a steady decline under the twin attack of iOS and Android.

I suspect that if any of the current players acquired WebOS from HP it would be mainly to beef up their patent portfolio with Palm’s patents – either to defend Android (Google), or attack it (Apple, RIM, Microsoft, etc.). And maybe incorporate choice bits of the platform into their own. But WebOS as a platform would be over and done.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking WebOS. I think it is a great operating system with a lot of clever design features. It is solid, stable, and loaded with features. It just had the misfortune of bad timing and poor management. If Palm had launched WebOS before Verizon launched the Droid and Android 2.0 they might have had a chance. If they hadn’t yoked themselves into a too-long exclusive agreement with a failing carrier (Sprint) they might’ve still had a fighting chance. But the reality is they were too late to market and the launch was under marketed and bungled, and by the time they hit other carriers Android was in full charge and iOS was well established. Palm didn’t have the money to effectively market WebOS against the two leaders. Neither did Sprint. Verizon was focused on Droid and wasn’t going to do much with WebOS. AT&T had iPhone and also wasn’t going to dilute that message. Sometimes good tech just doesn’t win in the market.

So why do I feel smug satisfaction? Because WebOS got me fired. Actually it was something I said on Sling Community about WebOS while I was working for Sling Media that got me fired from my position as a Beta Program Manager there. I deleted the post within days, and EchoStar has since purchased and shut down Sling Community itself, so I thought it was long gone. But I just had the inspiration to check Archive.org – and found the post:

January 26, 2009 6:26 PM

As has been pointed out, the actual development information hasn’t been released yet so it is premature to be talking about development. From what we have seen it looks like webOS is an all-new environment, so it would need an all-new SPM which would not be a small task. At this time we’re taking a wait and see approach to webOS. When it ships we’ll watch the adoption rate and decide if it warrants developing SPM for webOS or not. Keep in mind it has currently been announced for one device (the Pre) on one carrier (#3 and currently falling) so it remains to be seen if and when it appears on additional devices and carriers for the worldwide market and achieves a significant market share.

There has to be a business justification to invest the resources in developing the client. The next logical platform is Android, which we’re already taking a strong look at. Unlike webOS, Android already has multiple announced devices with commitments from several major device makers for even more, with carriers lined up world-wide. Remember that from our point of view it is the intersection of users with the platform *and* a Slingbox who are also interested in using SPM. Engineering resources aren’t free, so there has to be some return on investment.

Speaking for myself, I’m skeptical about webOS. I’m an old-time Palm OS user, I had a Palm IIIx, Visor Deluxe, Sony Clie NZ-90, Treo 650, and I still carry a Treo 680 as my personal phone. But because I’ve been following Palm for so long I’ve also been burned and disappointed too many times. I don’t have any faith left in Palm’s ability to execute and succeed after Palm OS 6 Cobalt, the PalmOne/Palm Source/Access mess, ALP, the idiotic Foleo, the interminable wait for Nova/webOS, etc. So they need to prove themselves to me all over again. Until I see webOS on multiple devices and carriers with a significant uptake I won’t really think of it differently than other proprietary phone platforms. It looks shiny and nice, but that’s not enough for me with Palm anymore.

-MegaZone, Sling Media Beta Manager
Slingbox PRO-HD w/TiVo Series3, Slingbox SOLO w/TiVo Pioneer DVR-810H, SPM Treo 680, SP WinXP
(I also run GizmoLovers.com)

That’s the post that cost me my job. Remember, it was made in the context of an ongoing forum thread of Sling Community members. But Dave Zatz spotted it and excerpted it in a post he made. (Let me interject right here that I consider Dave a friend and a colleague and when I see people blaming him for my being fired it bothers me. So don’t. I’m responsible for what I said.) Once Dave’s post went up it got picked up by Boy Genius Report, CNET, etc. Pieces of what I said were everywhere overnight, taken out of the original context. It sounded like I was making an official statement for the company, and that seems to be what upset the powers that be at EchoStar.

Dave’s post went up on January 31st, and I was fired the morning of February 2nd. Word had come down from somewhere on high that I was to be terminated as quickly as possible, no discussion. I’ve been laid off a couple of times, but that’s the only time in my professional career that I was fired. (I was fired once before, but that was when I worked the snack bar in college and I decided to see how long it would take them to fire me if I slacked off instead of just quitting. Several weeks, as it turned out.)

But look at what I wrote. This was after we saw WebOS and the Pre at CES, but before it actually launched. I think it was fairly prescient. Everything I expected, all of my concerns, came to pass. Launching a single device on Sprint turned out to be a disastrous move. Instead of the Pre & WebOS being a halo device to help turn Sprint’s fortunes around, Sprint turned out to be the albatross around the Pre’s neck. Sprint was in bad shape and couldn’t spend much to market the Pre, and Palm wasn’t exactly flush at the time either. Since they were trapped in an exclusive agreement Palm couldn’t take the Pre to another carrier, like Verizon, who had money and needed something to fight the iPhone. The Motorola Droid filled that gap and the Droid+Verizon partnership turned out to be everything Palm wanted, and needed, the Pre+Sprint partnership to be, but wasn’t. By the time the Pre was free of Sprint Verizon had no use for it. They picked it up but not so as you’d notice.

Of course, WebOS never did carve out more than a negligible market share and Sling Media never released a SlingPlayer Mobile for the platform. While they did support Android. In fact, as I wrote that post I had a T-Mobile G1 from Sling to play with to get a feel for Android as it was an upcoming project, after the then in progress iOS app. And that Treo 680 I mentioned as my personal phone? That was replaced by the Motorola Droid I still carry, which I picked up as soon as it launched. (And will probably be replaced by the Nexus/Droid/Samsung Prime later this year, if the rumors pan out.)

So yeah, everything I said was true and it all played out pretty much as I expected except for the second wind from HP, and even that just stretched things out. But it cost me my job. So I just wanted to say – I told you so.

And that’s where my smug satisfaction comes from.

So, this brings me to the site’s long hiatus. But that’ll be the next post…

This acquisition has spurred talk in some circles about TiVo’s fate. Why? Well, a number of people think TiVo is a candidate for a buyout. TiVo still has a poison pill to prevent a hostile takeover, but that is expiring in November. And even with the pill in place the BoD can accept a buyout offer at any time without triggering the pill. The pill just helps prevent hostile bids.

There has been speculation that Google could be a suitor. TiVo has a history with hardware, a successful DVR platform, and deals with MSOs. All things Google could use to beef up Google TV – but now all things they have in Motorola, only moreso.

On the other hand, TiVo is involved with patent lawsuits with Verizon (who uses Motorola HW) and AT&T (who also uses Motorola HW), having recently finally settled with Dish Network for $500 million. If Google feels that they may have a liability in these suits, it is possible that they would seek to have them settled as part of the acquisition. Possibly even buying TiVo in order to do so, along with acquiring their patents which could be useful for Google TV and Motorola’s own DVRs. Though I think that’d be a drastic step to take, they could likely settle with TiVo for less than the cost of a buyout. They’d really have to see value in owning the whole package to go that far.

Personally, while my dream marriage would be Google buying TiVo and integrating it into Google TV, I think that is much less likely to happen now that Google has MMI – on top of their recent SageTV acquisition. They’ll have everything they need to roll their own super STB in house once the Motorola deal closes.

On the other hand, if I’m Cisco, Motorola’s largest competitor in the STB market, I might be looking to beef up my product offering. Cisco and TiVo already work together – Cisco is providing the hardware for Virgin Media in the UK and ONO in Spain. So they have a solid track record. Cisco’s STB software has perhaps a worse reputation than Motorola’s, and offering a TiVo-based solution could be a real shot in the arm for them. Especially if Google does push Google TV onto Motorola DVRs.

Cisco also has a retail presence through Linksys, and increasingly under their own brand. They’re familiar with STB hardware, DVRs, retail, and TiVo’s software. They could conceivably add the TiVo Premiere, Premiere XL, Premiere Elite, and Preview to their STB lineup as is for both retail and MSOs. Motorola did something similar when they offered a couple of Moxi-based DVRs and the MoxiMate to MSOs. Those units were unlike any others in their lineup. That would be a rapid way for Cisco to offer a TiVo-based solution, and then they could incorporate the interface into their other STBs going forward.

Of course, that’s all pure speculation. Cisco seems to have little to lose in buying TiVo though. There’s nothing to upset the existing MSO deals in the US, or in most other countries. Most of the foreign TiVo deals are using TiVo developed or Cisco HW already. It could cause some friction with the DirecTV deal as that is using Technicolor HW, same for the Scandinavian deal with Canal Digital, but that could be addressed in contracts. And even if it killed the deals, I think Cisco could live with it. The DirecTV deal is approaching two years past due now and there’s reason to be skeptical about it ever coming to fruition at this point anyway.

I don’t think it would cause an issue for deals like the Best Buy Insignia TVs as there is no direct competition with any Cisco products. They’re complimentary, not competitive.

On the other hand it would give Cisco’s STB product line a boost when trying to land deals with MSOs against Motorola, especially if the latter gets Google TV.

In light of the Google-Motorola deal, as pure speculation, I think I’d consider Cisco the leading candidate to acquire TiVo at this point. I don’t necessarily think it will happen, just that if anyone did I’d put them in the lead.

As for other suitors that have been speculated on.

Apple – No way. They have a strong ‘Not Invented Here’ culture. TiVo is Linux based, Apple uses BSD, it’d be a major rewrite to bring TiVo over to iOS to merge it with Apple TV or the like. And Apple is all about providing content silos via iTunes, I’m not sure a DVR fits their plans.

Microsoft – Doubtful. MS is mildly allergic to Linux. They already have Media Center and successful IPTV STB software – AT&T runs on it. They also have the Xbox 360 for OTT content. Media center extenders are neglected, but still out there too. If MS wanted to get into the DVR business I think they’d roll their own based on their existing STB software before buying TiVo.

Rovi – Maybe. Rovi, formerly known as Macrovision Solutions Corporation, has several product lines, including software for set top boxes. If they had an inclination to get into DVRs and get onto more MSO boxes, they might do so via TiVo.

Dish Network or EchoStar – Doubtful. There was speculation that they may buy TiVo as a way to settle their long-running lawsuit. But now that they’ve settled the case I don’t see Dish or EchoStar having a good reason to buy TiVo. EchoStar already has one of the better DVR platforms out there, along with Slingbox, so they have little to gain in a buyout.

DirecTV – Doubtful. With the new DirecTiVo sliding further and further to the right, DirecTV hardly seems excited about TiVo. They already have a deal in place that covers TiVo’s patents, and they seem to be happy evolving their own DVRs. And they already acquired ReplayTV’s IP a few years back, so they have DVR patents of their own too.

I’ve seen other speculation – that NDS might buy them to kill the competition off or that Comcast (or another MSO) will buy them to monopolize the TiVo interface on their network, etc. But all of those seem even less likely to me.

Right now, I think Cisco would gain the most from acquiring TiVo.

Of course, then again, Cisco has been pulling back from consumer products, such as in shutting down Flip. So I might be completely off base.

But, like I said, this is all just speculation. It is fun to talk about, but I’m not going to put down money on any of these deals happening.

So, what do you think? What does the Google-Motorola deal mean for TiVo, if anything? Or who do you think might be a suitor for TiVo? Or do you think that’s backwards and TiVo is going to use part of their $500 million award from EchoStar/Dish to buy someone else? Or just grow organically?

Leave a comment with your thoughts!

This would allow consumer electronics vendors, such as Sony or TiVo, to build devices that would be able to plug into any programming source – cable, satellite, or fiber – and to access the full range of content. Not just linear channels, but also SDV, PayPerView, and OnDemand content. You may be aware that TiVo has deals in place with a handful of cable MSOs to access OnDemand content. RCN & Suddenlink already provide TiVo hardware to their customers which can access OnDemand, and Charter will begin doing so this year. And Cox & Comcast have agreements with TiVo to allow access to OnDemand via retail TiVo units in the coming months.

But this is piecemeal. TiVo has to pursue individual deals with each MSO, and then customize their software to work that that MSO’s OnDemand head end. There isn’t a standardized interface, and TiVo remains locked out of other MSOs. Not to mention they’re still locked out of satellite and IPTV fiber services like U-Verse because CableCARD is only mandated for cable MSOs. (FiOS uses cable standards for linear content, but IPTV for OnDemand.) And that’s just TiVo, if Sony wanted to provide the same kind of access on their products they’d have to make the same kind of individual deals with the MSOs. And then Samsung. Etc. It just isn’t the same as having open, defined standards that every vendor can implement.

AllVid is the vision for that new standard, and it would supplant CableCARD, hopefully eliminating the many shortcomings that have restricted its popularity with consumers. (Like the lack of access to OnDemand content.)

Of course, the industry, primarily in the form of the NCTA, is resisting any effort to mandate the AllVid vision. They want to be left alone, claiming that industry innovation makes AllVid unnecessary. They point to things like the TiVo-MSO deals, and a growing number of new services like Comcast’s Xfinity mobile apps. But that’s apples & oranges, saying you can stream content on your iPad isn’t the same as being able to access it on your TV with a set top box you purchased because it has the features you want. And the AllVid Alliance argues just that, in a new filing with the FCC. Just a sample:

Section 629 of the Communications Act is not satisfied by consumers being able to download an MVPD’s app on a particular brand of television set or “cable systems…developing new ways to use the Internet.” While MVPDs point to the latest
“shiny thing over there,” they ignore the Section 629 mandate of the Communications Act. The Commission must not lose sight of the fact that Congress directed the Commission to foster a competitive retail market for navigation devices used by consumers to access the full range of services offered by MVPDs, and to access that programming and those services through manufacturers, retailers and other vendors not affiliated with any MVPD

And:

An AllVid gateway would empower a consumer to use any consumer electronics (“CE”) product to receive any programming offered by an MVPD on a subscriber basis, and would allow any CE product to work securely with respect to multichannel content. Consumers would no longer need to be concerned about how to port content to or store content on TV, computer, game, tablet, or mobile platforms, and whether programs would be lost if the consumer switches to a different MVPD or even to a different device. Consumers would have the option of choosing multichannel programming interactively without worrying about a potential cap on their use of Internet bandwidth. Multiple CE manufacturers–not just those that have negotiated deals with MVPDs–would be able to respond to consumers with innovations that directly address their needs and desires.

They go on to cite the historic Carterfone decision of 1968, which allowed consumers to stop renting their phones from AT&T and to connect non-AT&T telephones, and other telephony devices, to the phone system. Significantly ‘other telephony devices’ includes computer modems. Without Carterfone the early growth of online services may have been stifled. At least acoustic couplers would’ve had a longer run I suppose. I was born in 1970, and I’m just old enough to remember a lot of remaining ‘AT&T’ industrial looking phones and the first wave of all the new, then-radical designs which broke the mold from the standard, archetypal ‘telephone’. The AllVid Alliance is looking to open up television services in the same way.

Ironically, the cable industry themselves have shown that the AllVid vision isn’t so hard to fulfill, despite their claims that it would bring hardship and exorbitant costs. A recent demonstration at a CableLabs interop event showed cable STBs running tru2way middleware were able to stream content over an IP interface to DLNA enabled media devices, using DTCP-IP content protection. This is based on a home networking spec from CableLabs themselves, and could serve as the core for an AllVid implementation. So why the objections to the FCC mandating some baseline standard to ensure a level playing field to start?

Personally, I hope the FCC does mandate AllVid, and that it has some teeth. I think they were too soft with CableCARD, especially in allowing tru2way, which was so unloved it seems everyone, cable and CE industry alike, are mostly trying to forget about it.

Via Multichannel News.

DISH Network Corporation (Nasdaq: DISH) and EchoStar Corporation (Nasdaq: SATS) issued the following statement regarding recent developments in the TiVo Inc. v. EchoStar Communications Corp. lawsuit:

“We are pleased that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) granted our Petition for Re-Examination of the software claims of TiVo’s ’389 patent, which are the subject of TiVo’s current motion for contempt. The PTO found that there is a ‘substantial new question’ of patentability as to the software claims in light of prior patents that appear to render TiVo’s ’389 patent invalid as obvious.”

And TiVo responded with their own statement:

TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television products and services for digital video recorders (DVR), offered the following statement today regarding the decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine the software claims of TiVo’s Time Warp Patent:

“EchoStar filed its latest request for reexamination after TiVo asked the United States District Court to hold EchoStar in contempt of the Court’s injunction requiring EchoStar to disable its DVR functionality. An evidentiary hearing on the contempt issues is scheduled to be held on February 17 and 18, 2009.

“EchoStar’s latest tactic follows numerous failed attempts to invalidate TiVo’s groundbreaking Time Warp patent. In 2006, the District Court rejected all of EchoStar’s validity challenges after a full jury trial and the judgment of validity was affirmed by the Federal Circuit in 2008. The USPTO also conducted a prior reexamination of the Time Warp Patent at EchoStar’s request, which concluded on November 11, 2008, with the USPTO issuing a Reexamination Certificate confirming the validity of all of the claims of the Time Warp Patent without any change. EchoStar’s latest request for reexamination is based on a combination of two prior art references that were both already submitted to the USPTO in connection with the earlier reexamination. The USPTO grants most patent reexamination requests. Contrary to EchoStar’s statement, the USPTO made no substantive findings. We are confident that the USPTO will once again confirm the validity of all of the claims of the Time Warp patent.”

Round and round we go…

The EchoStar HD DuoDVR SlingLoaded ViP 922 won CNET’s “Best of CES” today, and two of G4’s judging panelists, Attack of the Show host Kevin Pereira and Wired’s Chris Hardwick, both picked EchoStar’s SlingLoaded 922 as their very favorite out of the entire 2009 CES. The EchoStar 922’s unique user interface and remote control were also selected as CES Innovations 2009 Design and Engineering Award honorees prior to the show.

More:

ECHOSTAR’S SLINGLOADED 922 WINS CNET’S ‘BEST OF CES’ AWARD FOR HOTTEST HOME VIDEO PRODUCT AT 2009 INTERNATIONAL CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW

Las Vegas, Jan. 10, 2009

Attention editors: EchoStar Technologies L.L.C. and Sling Media, subsidiaries of EchoStar Corporation, announced today that it won a “Best of CES” award from the editors of CNET (www.CNET.com) for its EchoStar SlingLoaded™ 922 HD DVR, the world’s first high definition digital video recorder that incorporates Sling Media’s patented placeshifting technology.

CNET, in cooperation with the Consumer Electronics Association, selected the EchoStar 922 SlingLoaded set-top box out of hundreds of entries from CES. The EchoStar 922 won in the home video category, besting the other finalists Panasonic and LG.

The EchoStar 922 is an entertainment centerpiece combining the best of video and IP technologies into a capacitive-touch set-top box. By integrating Sling Media’s Slingbox technology, the EchoStar 922 lets TV aficionados watch and control their favorite TV shows and sporting events from anywhere in the world via a broadband Internet connection on their laptop or mobile phone. Accessing multiple video sources, viewers will never run out of shows to watch. The EchoStar 922 features a massive 1 terabyte hard drive for up to 1,000 hours of storage and supports external hard drives.

The EchoStar 922 is a revolutionary departure from the traditional cable or satellite set-top box. Its touchpad remote control, which eliminates half the buttons of a standard remote control, gives users cursor-like navigation on their TV screen. With a slide of the thumb, viewers experience scroll-over activation of widget-like tiles and pop-up menus, all selectable by an underside index finger trigger.

The new user interface goes beyond traditional text-based user interfaces by using movie poster graphics, tiles or widget-based menus, and cursor-type navigation for a powerful yet simplified user experience that is highly adaptable to future applications.

EchoStar will deliver the EchoStar 922 to its first operator, DISH Network, in spring 2009 as the HD DuoDVR™ SlingLoaded™ ViP® 922, furnishing satellite TV customers with a break-through TV experience.

Selected by CNET’s unbiased expert editors, winners are recognized as having the hottest products in their respective technology categories for their unmatched innovation and creativity, and their ability to excite consumers and help them explore a world gone digital. CNET editors reviewed hundreds of entries, as well as scoured the 2009 International CES show floor for products to consider for the prestigious award.

The ten categories include car tech; cell phones and smart phones; computers and hardware; digital photo and video; gaming; GPS; home audio; home video; MP3 and portable video players; and televisions. A video of the winners and finalists showcasing their technologies can be found at http://www.cnet.com/ces.

For images of the 922 and its award winning remote control and user interface, please visit: http://www.slingmedia.com/go/press-downloads.

Disclaimer: Yes, I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar. I’m proud of my company winning this award and think this is a pretty cool product.

Going into this CES I’m not sure what the big deal is going to be this year, if there is one. The economy is down and I haven’t really felt any particular buzz about any given area of the market. HDTVs get bigger while getting thinner and faster (refresh rates). We may see some interesting 3D technologies which will start to enter homes in the next few years. Palm is expected to announce Nova and new hardware, but I’m not excited. I was a die-hard Palm OS user for many years, since 1998, and still carry a Treo 680. But after five or more years of waiting for Palm OS 6 Cobalt Nova I just don’t feel that inspired. I’m already focused on Android as my next likely platform, and it would take a lot for Palm to sway me. Even if they produce an incredible OS, they have an uphill battle ahead to win over developers. I don’t think they have a real chance at this point to gain significant market share. And without that the developers won’t come – and the apps really make the platform.

Going forward I think the mobile market will effectively be, in no particular order, Windows Mobile Professional, BlackBerry, Symbian S60, iPhone, and Android. The original Palm OS is the walking dead, and I don’t see Nova/Palm OS II carving out enough market share to be viable. Symbian UIQ is effectively dead as SonyEricsson and Motorola have pulled out and the Symbian world is focused on the S60-based open source effort. Windows Mobile Standard (aka Smartphone) is rapidly dying as Professional-based touch screen devices move into the lower end of the market where Standard used to focus. I expect Android, which is basically just coming into the market, to post the biggest gains as more devices land. I think the LiMo/LIPS effort will falter and expect to see some of the vendors who have been working on it switch to Android. I think those five platforms will provide the bulk of the smartphone market, anything else will be a small niche.

We’ll probably see more tru2way devices on display from a number of vendors this year, but I don’t know that we’ll see anything revolutionary in that market. I’m hoping TiVo may be showing off their ‘Series4′ tru2way-enabled model, which they’re believed to have been working on for a while. And they may be showing their new DirecTV software, which I expect will be running on the HR20/21/22 DirecTV DVR Plus hardware. I’m not expecting anything else major, maybe some new content partnership announcements and perhaps plans to bring TiVo to more countries. (I’m surprised they haven’t re-launched in the UK yet with the DVB-T model actually.)

The past couple of years the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD fight provided some interest. But that was effectively over with CES2008, and officially ended when Toshiba threw in the towel in February. There aren’t likely to be any big announcements in the Blu-ray world, aside from more content partnerships like LG adding CinemaNow and YouTube to Netflix on their players. Maybe someone will be showing off higher density disc or 3D content concepts.

I’m hoping to be surprised by something at the show, something just unexpected. If you know of something I should be on the look out for, do let me know. And if you’re going to CES drop by the Sling Media booth and say hello. I believe I’m on the afternoons of Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on Friday morning. I’m also scheduled to present for Sling Media at CntrStg on Saturday. Frankly I’m nervous as hell about that. It has been years since I’ve done a presentation or talk at a tradeshow and never at anything as big as CES.

OK, off to finish packing.

If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington decides that a jury trial is warranted, it would bring everything around to where it was a few years ago – a trial to determine if TiVo’s patents are being infringed. While the jury in the first trial sided with TiVo, and the verdict was upheld on appeal, Dish claims that their new software is no longer infringing. So if a new trial is granted it’d be the same case, redux.

I Am Not A Lawyer, but it seems odd to me. Can this be stretched out indefinitely just by issuing software updates and saying each one needs a new jury trial to determine if it is infringing? I think this show jumped the shark.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar.

After the announcement, EchoStar and DISH Network issued this statement:

“We are pleased that the district court did not find us in contempt on the face of the injunction. We look forward to the February bench trial on our software design-around. Our subscribers can continue using their award-winning DVRs from DISH Network.”

TiVo responded with a statement of their own:

“We are pleased that the U.S. District Court has scheduled a hearing on EchoStar’s purported workaround on February 17, 2009. Contrary To EchoStar’s statement today, the Court did not rule on TiVo’s pending motion for contempt of the injunction. The Court will do so after the hearing as well as rule on the amount of damages owed to TiVo beyond the nearly $105 million already paid by EchoStar. This is a positive step, particularly the accelerated discovery ordered by the Court, towards the ultimate resolution of all issues in the litigation and we remain confident that we will prevail in showing that EchoStar’s workaround does not avoid infringement.”

So more jousting on both sides. Now we stay tuned until February.

UPDATE: TiVo issued a revised statement today, note the difference:

“We are pleased that the U.S. District Court has scheduled a hearing on EchoStar’s purported workaround on February 17, 2009. Contrary to EchoStar’s statement yesterday, the Court did not rule on TiVo’s pending motion for contempt of the injunction. The Court will do so after the hearing as well as rule on the amount of damages owed to TiVo (which EchoStar admitted at the September 4, 2008 hearing are owed) beyond the nearly $105 million already paid by EchoStar. This is a positive step, particularly the accelerated discovery ordered by the Court, towards the ultimate resolution of all issues in the litigation and we remain confident that we will prevail in showing that EchoStar’s workaround does not avoid infringement.”

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar.

Dish Network is selling several converter boxes — the TR-40 CRA, DTVPal, DTVPal Plus and the DTVPal DVR (the latter available latter[sic] this month) — that will receive and convert digital TV signals to analog and pass through remaining low-power TV channels.

Information on the DTVPal DVR, introduced back at CES as the EchoStar TR-50, has been pretty scarce. It is an OTA-only DVR, basically a DTVPal (TR-40) converter box with added DVR features. So it’ll be interested to see those hit the market.

As for the main subject of the article, the CBA will be teaming with Dish Network to promote Dish’s lineup of converter boxes to TV viewers who will be impacted by the February 17, 2009 digital transition.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar, who makes the boxes for Dish Network.

“We are pleased to have received $104,600,472 from EchoStar on October 8, 2008, which includes the initial $74 million in damages awarded by the United States District Court for EchoStar’s willful patent infringement as well as supplemental damages covering the period through September 8, 2006 and interest. We remain confident that the District Court will enforce the injunction and award further damages from EchoStar’s continued infringement of our Time Warp patent.”

Judge Folsom in Texas had said he’d try to render his decision by October 1, but that it may come as late as November. As the decision has not yet been delivered, we may have a few more weeks before the final word. Then, of course, DISH there could be further appeals of his decision.

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.

EchoStar is one of the world’s largest vendors of set-top products for PayTV, having shipped more than 53 million digital receiver devices, including more than 3.8 million HD-STBs and 9.7 million DVRs.

From the company’s beginnings as the technology behind US pay TV operation ‘DISH Network’, EchoStar’s broad product spectrum now extends into many millions of homes across Europe and The Americas, encompassing satellite, digital terrestrial and IPTV services.

New at IBC, EchoStar is announcing its arrival onto the Cable TV stage, with the introduction of a global range of high-definition QAM set-tops, including MPEG4 DVR and DOCSIS devices, available with a variety of popular CA and middleware options. EchoStar’s legendary reliability and cost-of-ownership advantages, borne of the company’s network operations experience, offers serious competitive advantage to MSOs and broadcasters everywhere.

EchoStar is also at the forefront of home networking technology, delivering custom multi-room solutions based on HomePlug, MOCA and DLNA. In addition, the place-shifting capabilities of SlingBox and Sling Media, an EchoStar company, are part of the breadth of the EchoStar proposition.

EchoStar not only delivers competitive products to demanding customers but also adds unique value. Our real-world experience ensures the technology works for your business.

Interestingly a press release on their presence at the show really stresses their ability to integrate Sling Media place-shifting features in their set top boxes.

EchoStar Europe is the exclusive provider of Sling Media™ place-shifting functionality in set-top boxes outside North America, with the platform independent solution available for integration in cable, satellite and IPTV STBs. In partnership with Sling Media™, the company will be highlighting the benefits of Sling Media™ software for home networking. A Sling Media integrated STB will provide an instant solution to complex multi-room, multi-screen requirements as encrypted digital Pay TV content can be moved seamlessly over IP using wired or wireless networking technologies to second TVs, PCs, laptops and mobiles.

The Sling set-top box platform emphasises EchoStar Europe’s ability to offer broadcast network operators solutions that differentiate services, increase customer loyalty and potentially increase revenues. At IBC the company is outlining its pioneering achievements in helping develop some of the world’s first DVRs, HD-DVRs and hybrid satellite/IPTV DVRs as part of the EchoStar family and demonstrating its leading position in both time-shifting and place-shifting.

While this is all focused on Europe I think this is a strong indication of what to expect from EchoStar in the US. (And I should say here that, while I work for Sling Media in my ‘day job’, this is just me as a blogger putting two and two together here and not any inside information. Got it?) Keep in mind that EchoStar recently signed the CableCARD and tru2way agreements with CableLabs in the US.

When EchoStar and DISH Network split this was one of the reasons given, to allow EchoStar to branch out into more hardware markets. While EchoStar remains the hardware supplier to DISH Network, no longer being the same entity makes it easier for them to sell hardware to other MSOs who may have balked at buying from a ‘competitor’. EchoStar has extensive experience with set-top box design and production, and with Sling Media under the same roof it gives them the opportunity to incorporate advanced place-shifting capabilities into their products. That should be no surprise as it was a stated goal in the Sling acquisition last year.

EchoStar was also touting their set-top box health monitoring system and advertising behavioral monitoring. Originally developed for DISH Network, but available for all forms of set-top box.

It certainly sounds like there will be some interesting products coming down the pipe.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar. But a I said above, this is just me as a blogger reporting on what I read from public sources. I almost didn’t post this because I don’t want someone thinking this is backed by inside info, it isn’t. But I think it would be cool.

To muddy the waters a bit more, DISH Network is now offering the TR-40 CRA for $39.99 – free with a coupon. And it looks like the TR-40 CRA is identical to the DTVPal, save for the labels. From the site’s FAQ:

What is the difference between TR-40 CRA and DTVPal?

TR-40 CRA is a special limited production version of the DTVPal. Offered at the government coupon price of $40, the TR-40 CRA includes the highly-acclaimed features and functionality of the DTVPal.

DTVPal has garnered much praise in recent months and is recommended as a “top choice” by CNET. DTVPal’s amazing features and consumer-friendly technology make it a great value at only $19.99 with a $40 government coupon.

So if you’re in need of a set-top box for the DTV transition you can get the TR-40 CRA free with a government coupon, and get the same hardware and features as the $60 DTVPal, which is $20 with the coupon.

Interestingly the NTIA list of approved set top boxes also includes the EchoStar TR-40 and a DISH Network DTVPal Plus, both of which are listed as approved, but currently unavailable. At first I thought the DTVPal Plus might be the EchoStar TR-50 ATSC DVR shown at CES, but it can’t be as having the TR-50s capabilities make it ineligible for a coupon, hence it wouldn’t be on the approved list. Curious.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar.

This license does open up new possibilities. A CableCARD-enabled Slingbox, perhaps. EchoStar could take their DVR platform, as used by DISH Network, and re-purpose it as a CableCARD DVR for cable MSOs and/or consumers. Something like the recently announced 722s DVR with built-in Slingbox & SlingCatcher features, only for cable, could be quite an interesting product. (Perhaps waiting for the final act in the DVR patent lawsuit with TiVo to remove any uncertainty for customers.) They could produce a whole new cable STB unrelated to any of their current platforms. It will certainly be interesting to see what they do with the license, I’m sure they didn’t sign it just for laughs.

Their press release is below:

For Immediate Release

EchoStar™ Signs tru2way™ Host Device License Agreement with CableLabs®

Company strengthens its commitment to the cable market with tru2way™ agreement, signaling its intent to build set-top boxes for the cable industry.

Englewood, CO., August 11, 2008 — EchoStar Technologies L.L.C., an operating entity of EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ: SATS), solidified its commitment to providing innovative products and technologies to the cable industry with its recent signing of the tru2way™ Host Device License Agreement with CableLabs®. This agreement grants EchoStar the rights required to implement OpenCable™ Application Platform (OCAP™) middleware and the CableCARD™ interface on devices using tru2way technology, allowing users to take full advantage of two-way, interactive cable services.

Tru2way technology is an innovative national software platform that enables cable’s interactive services to be delivered to two-way plug and play TVs, set-top boxes, and other devices. Tru2way also creates a national footprint for the creators of interactive services to develop products that work on cable systems in nearly every U.S. market. Major cable operators have committed to support the tru2way platform on systems covering more than 90 million U.S. homes by the end of 2008.

The agreement consolidates, clarifies, and provides an alternative to the existing CableCARD-Host Interface License Agreement (CHILA), and the OpenCable™ Application Platform Implementer Agreement. The tru2way License Agreement is available to any consumer electronics manufacturer on a nondiscriminatory basis.

“We are firmly committed to becoming a vendor of choice in the cable industry, leveraging decades of systems and manufacturing excellence and today’s announcement asserts our commitment,” said EchoStar President, Mark Jackson.

The new tru2way Host Device License Agreement provides manufacturers of retail consumer electronics devices streamlined access to technology required to interface with two-way interactive cable networks, and aligns with the “openness” focus announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Among other terms, the license provides for self-certification and paper certification of retail devices, formal rights of participation by consumer electronics manufacturers in CableLabs processes, approval of new digital outputs via a four-studio approach, and a tru2way trademark license.

EchoStar enters the cable industry with a strong consumer electronics background in innovative and intuitive products, including state-of-the-art, award-winning set-top boxes and value-added features such as Sling Media’s innovative and award-winning placeshifting technology.

EchoStar’s set-top box veterans have over 35 years experience in engineering, manufacturing, product development, and end-to-end systems.

EchoStar’s introduction to the cable industry began at The Cable Show, May 18-20, 2008, where the company displayed the SlingModem™ — a CableLabs Certified® DOCSIS 2.0 cable modem combined with the placeshifting technology of a Slingbox™.

About EchoStar Technologies L.L.C.

As an operating entity of the publicly traded EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ: SATS), EchoStar Technologies L.L.C. spans 25 years of delivering innovations in TV entertainment, products, and end-to-end systems. EchoStar services satellite, IPTV, cable, terrestrial, and consumer electronics markets worldwide by combining engineering, supply chain, manufacturing, and service into one company. With over 1,600 professional employees worldwide, EchoStar is focused, dedicated, and ready to service our customers in creative and cooperative development efforts. Through extensive experience with set-top boxes and end-to-end systems, EchoStar is able to provide more competitive business strategies, practices, and reduced product and operational costs.

EchoStar is headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, with operations in Foster City, California; Denver, Colorado; Atlanta, Georgia; Steeton, UK; Almelo, Holland; and Kharkov, Ukraine. Visit www.echostar.com for additional information.

CableLabs, OpenCable, OCAP and tru2way are trademarks of Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.

Press Contact
For inquiries and additional information, please contact Brian Jaquet, at Office: (650) 293-8022, Mobile: (415) 235-4844, or jaquet@slingmedia.com.

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