If you look at the case TiVo came up with their product and approached many companies including DirecTV and Dish to see about licensing it.

DirecTV licensed it, but Dish declined to license, “lost” their evaluation unit and shortly afterward came out with their own “DVR”s which ripped off TiVo’s.

TiVo is not a “Patent Troll” (ala NTP) they are a real company who came up with real innovations and then marketed those in actual products.

This is an example of the patent system actually working as intended, albeit over a much too long time period.

Booo!

I’m no apologist for the current Tivo interface. Its obviously behind the times, with its heavy use of text and the somewhat painful inclusion of pointless advertisements. Yet, its still an easy to use an acceptable interface for a DVR.

What it isn’t at this point is an acceptable interface for anything else. Subscribing to podcasts. listening to your music, browsing your photos, or even renting a movie are all painfully backwards compared to say the same experience on an Apple TV. And I’m not even sure the Apple TV’s interface is that amazing… but at least it has little pictures of the movie covers, and manages to sort the TV episodes into order, etc.

Obviously Tivo is focusing on their added value lately, i.e. all of the above. And they’ve got some work to do there…

Still, no love for EchoStar even though I don’t think they violated Tivo’s original patent (given that they simply record the already encoded digital stream…)