If you’ve been waiting to buy the new TiVo “lite”, now’s your chance. Purportedly, TiVo’s retail partners are fully stocked - including Best Buy, Circuit City and (as seen below) online at Amazon. We’ll have to wait and see if sales of this lower cost HD DVR have any impact on TiVo’s profit outlook.

I remember when Motorola (yes, my employer) rolled out its first HD DVR years after TiVo and ReplayTV first hit the market. There was some general concern about Motorola being late to the game, but the truth was that DVRs hadn’t really made a splash yet, at least in terms of mass adoption.

Today, Leightman Research Group says that one in every five US households has a DVR, up from roughly one in thirteen in 2005. (NewTeeVee picked up the story) That’s pretty big growth, and yet TiVo isn’t seeing much of the profit compared to the cable and telecom companies that have swept the market. It’s an old story. TiVo is expensive. Leased set-tops from operators are cheap.

The situation could still change of course if and when Comcast starts rolling out TiVo software on Motorola set-tops. (Cox also has a deal with TiVo in place.) We’re supposed to see initial trials in New England this month. Will TiVo hit Comcast markets in the next nine days?

It looks like TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster will be packing their bags for Massachusetts, after they won the first of many legal scrimmages in their patent defense against Lycos. Lycos has asserted that all three companies have violated patents they own, on “information filtering technology.� The two patents that are at the heart of the case are related to the recommendation services that the companies provide.

After Lycos filed their lawsuit against the trio, ChoiceStream (the company that created Blockbuster’s suggestion service) filed a separate lawsuit, to have the patents thrown out.

In their lawsuit against Lycos, they argue that the patents are invalid because of obviousness and prior art. Because Choicestream filed their own lawsuit in the Massachusetts’ court system, TiVo, Netflix and Blockbuster sought to have their case transferred there as well. I’m not familiar enough with the legal subtleties to know why Lycos originally opposed the motion, but with Lycos’ headquarters in MA, the judge found the request reasonable enough and granted the motion.

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Now that TiVo has inked a deal with Seven to launch service Down Under, they’ve begun lining up a number of advertisers:

At least 20 big companies have rapidly signed up with cheques of more than $1 million to become “foundation partners” with Seven in the TiVo service. Those fat cheques give the companies early and usually exclusive access to, and participation in, Australian TiVo trials to figure out how consumers are going to behave

Makes me wonder what happened to the majority of US-based on-box TiVo advertising. It’s been relatively quiet… Does Product Watch still exist? Perhaps it’s more lucrative and easier to sell advertising viewing habits via StopWatch.

I was chatting with one of my blogging buddies who mentioned I should check out The 4400. We had caught the first season on DVD and enjoyed it, but I heard or read something that implied the later seasons weren’t as good - and we moved on. However, he said he’s enjoyed all of them… So we’re going to give it a shot and before we miss more episodes, I headed on over to tivo.com for some online scheduling action.

As you can see from the image above, I was hit with a survey. Before getting into the nitty gritty of it, they asked why I was visiting the site. Apparently I gave the wrong answer because the survey abruptly concluded. Bummer.

So what could tivo.com use? We had an interesting suggestion the other day for some badge creation tools that hook into our units and display our top Season Passes and such. I think we could even go a little simpler by displaying our model(s) — though, they should be customizable. Everyone wants to brag about the size of their hard drive, right?

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Speaking publicly on the recent Patent Office decisions… Both TiVo and EchoStar appear to hope for the best while appeasing (or is that calming?) their stock holders via the press.

TiVo:

“The patent office affirmed the majority of the claims of the patent including two that the jury found that EchoStar infringed,” he said. “The finding of infringement of one claim is all TiVo needs to prevail against EchoStar. “We do not believe that the ongoing process of re-examining the other claims will have any impact on the appeal of the jury’s determination that Echostar infringed on TiVo’s patent,” he said.

EchoStar:

“Based on our current analysis of the case, including the appellate record and other factors, we believe it is more likely than not that we will prevail on appeal,” EchoStar said.

Building the perfect DVR/video-entertainment device is hard, which is why cable or telco TV plus a Netflix or Blockbuster + Movielink service is probably your best bet right now. But lest ye be sitting in your living room bemoaning the state of your set-top set-up, let me offer up a bit of context on why building the perfect box is so hard.

There’s the leased set-top model used by cable operators. In an effort to make those set-tops as cheap and efficient as possible, a lot of constraints are applied. There can’t be too much storage or processing power, too many added features or too much open access for modification that could muck up the service for everyone. Not an ideal situation, but on the other hand, these operators bring DVR to the masses.

There’s the retail model, which is owned by TiVo. People who have TiVo tend to love TiVo, but relatively few people have it because of the price. Plus, there’s the issue of plugging TiVo into your cable or telco network. Either you need a separate set-top from your service provider or you need a CableCARD. CableCARD certification is a serious technical challenge (more than I think most people realize) and it still doesn’t provide access to two-way services like video-on-demand and switched digital video.

Finally there’s the Internet model. All those media extenders that made big news early in the year, and P2P services like Joost (the box here being your computer). Here the problem is both content and bandwidth. Not enough appealing, timely content to keep people happy, and/or not enough bandwidth to keep content flowing efficiently.

So what’s on the horizon? (more…)