LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A federal judge in Texas awarded set-top box maker TiVo Inc about $190 million in damages on Tuesday in a long-running patent infringement dispute with DISH Network Corp and EchoStar Corp.

[...]

TiVo’s patent with several digital video recorder models by implementing new “workaround” technology that TiVo claimed still infringed.

The court set a June 26 hearing on potential sanctions against EchoStar.

In his final order, Folsom ruled that TiVo should recover from EchoStar $73.9 million plus $15.7 million in interest on the patent infringement claims, plus $103.1 million in damages plus interest accrued during the stay of the injunction.

read more on Reuters

In after hours trading, TIVO was up more than $2 a share ($9.37 at 7:35pm EDT).

Multichannel News has a story about the relationship between Comcast & TiVo.  The two companies have been in a relationship for years now, and other than Internet speculation and complaining from people in test markets, you rarely seem to hear anything about it.  Now, in an as yet unnamed market, Comcast will be offering TiVo as the primary DVR.   While that and the rest of the highlights is progress, the pace seems glacial.

From Multichannel News:

Read the full story

TiVo Loses 139k Subscribers vs. 125k in Previous Quarter

In the quarter ending April 30, 2009, TiVo’s total subscribers fell 139,000 to 3.196 million, approximately the same level they had in early 2005. That comprises an ever tinier share of the US DVR population which continues to expand. TiVo could have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter, it only sold about 400 of its own TiVo DVRs a day.

TiVo subscribers July 2001- April 2009

Read the full story

Media Week has a story on how TiVo is looking to step in and fill a void left by Nielsen measurement to provide commercial  viewing measurement with DVR viewing factored in for local markets..  Nielsen has begun providing program viewing measurements that include 3 days of DVR viewing at the local level, but these local delayed viewing measurements don’t measure the commercial viewing advertisers want to see.

The bad news for TiVo is that it hasn’t had a quarter where it had any net subscriber gains in over two years.  The Media Week story notes, while the TiVo data can’t provide the rich demographic data that advetisers want (and Nielsen provides), even though it doesn’t have a large DVR subscriber base relative to the cable and satellite companies, it would have larger samples than typical ratings measurements for local markets.

one benefit of watching the DVR live plus seven number regularly, you don’t need to do any studies or research to see that there is less same day DVR viewing occurring on the same day that shows air with 10pm shows than with earlier shows.   And the data just backed up the intuitive notion that less people watch the 10pm shows on DVR the same night because they air later.

But a new study from TiVo suggests both live and DVR viewing of the 10pm hour are getting hurt because people are watching the shows they recorded at 9pm when those shows are on.   It’s hard to know how much this extends to the broader DVR universe because almost all DVRs provided by cable and satellite companies these days have at least two tuners.

My time shifting Lost by 20 minutes (and I also DVR’d Life) doesn’t stop me from DVRing two more shows at 10pm (though obviously I would, if I had only one tuner).   Unfortunately, however, the need to sleep ultimately does push DVR viewing of 10pm shows off a  day or two.

Read the full story

from Broadcasting & Cable:

Digital video recorder (DVR) supplier TiVo, which has been trying to build a separate audience measurement business through its Stop||Watch ratings service, says that TiVo customers watched over half of the January 2009 primetime season premieres on a timeshifted basis. It also says that a significant percentage watched the shows more than three days after their initial airing, falling outside of the “C3″ ratings metric adopted in 2007 by measurement giant Nielsen to incorporate timeshifted viewing into the ratings picture.

TiVo, which pulls its Stop||Watch data from a daily sample of 100,000 TiVo subscribers, says that six of the seven network season premieres in January drew at least 50% of their audiences on a timeshifted basis, and that Lost and 24 led the pack with 67% and 64% of their viewers, respectively, watching on their own schedule. American Idol had 60% of its viewers watching on a timeshifted basis. The show also scored the highest timeshifted rating at 11.5, with Lost and 24 coming in second and third at 10.7 and 8.9, respectively.

TiVo had some interesting findings relating to the relevance of the C3 metric. TiVo says that 27% of viewers that watched Lost on a timeshifted basis did so between three days and two weeks after it originally aired, and that Friday Night Lights and 24 both saw 20% of their viewers wait at least three days before watching the programs as well.

TiVo Loses 125k Subscribers vs. 163k in Previous Quarter

In the quarter ending January 31, 2009, TiVo’s total subscribers fell 125,000 to 3.335 million, approximately the same level they had in April, 2005. As we’ve written before, TiVo could have a valuable intellectual property portfolio, but its hardware selling business is over. For the most recent quarter which included Christmas, it sold approximately 650 of its own TiVo DVRs a day.

TiVo subscribers July 2001- January 2009

Read the full story

Despite the headline, I don’t think TiVo CEO Tom Rogers is doing his best Chicken Little impersonation, because when it comes to television business models, the sky is actually falling! But Rogers seems to get out there with it about once every three months these days.

Fortunately for the TV industry, it’s not falling at a rate that has caused it to come crashing down on top of it yet, but TV Week reports that this Wednesday, when Rogers addresses the crowd assembled at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference, the speech he will be delivering is entitled “Avoiding the Demise of TV Advertising.” Here are some Rogers snippets from the TV Week piece:

• “When the writing is on the wall and the change is here and users are doing something different, there’s really not a choice in the matter as to whether you get your hands around it,” he said. “You either get overrun by those trends, or you embrace them really quickly.”
• “You’ve got to have actionability right off the remote at that time the product appears in a program to make a successful means to deal with traditional commercial avoidance.”
• “It’s not enough to acknowledge that you are aware of this or in some way involved. You have to commit to urgent action on learning so this can customized for you,” he said. “So if it’s two years or three years from now, you’re ahead of this curve ready to benefit from it as opposed to being bitten by it.
• “How much energy is devoted to what you really need to learn is the question now.”

I’ve somewhat played with the order that TV Week used, but to make a point. The sky is falling somewhere else: TiVo’s business of offering standalone DVRs isn’t going so well. We’ve longed believe there was money in licensing (and perhaps in IP lawsuits, though that really just winds up rolling over into licensing), but stand-alone DVRs are an area where TiVo has struggled in a big way.

One area where TiVo can probably grow rapidly is sales of the TiVo data services (more info on TiVo Stop||Watch) . I suppose in no small part, at least as far as Rogers is concerned, a great way to do more than acknowledge you are aware of the landscape and to get ahead of the curve and devote some energy into what you really need to learn is this: buy TiVo’s data!

Read A Wake-Up Call From TiVo’s CEO on TVWeek.com.