No Surprise

It was no surprise hearing the news that the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Echostar / Dish Networks appeal against Tivo.

Over the past few months they folks I have spoken with at Dish admitted they knew it was a long shot. But it was a gamble they were going to take.

So what’s this loss mean for Dish Network customers?  At the moment nothing it’s business as usual.  All customers DVR’s will continue to work and it will be business as usual.  However that could all change as Tivo and Dish continue to wait for a decision of a Texas Court which is deciding if Dish Network is in contempt over a software patient.  Dish Network claims that that they have put out a software patch to its DVR’s which in turn does not violate Tivo’s patients.

While Dish Network is optimistic that it will be victorious it appears that Dish is making moves to prevent any downtime for its customers if they were to lose this contempt motion.  Dish has been upgrading customers who own a Dish 721 DVR to new DVR’s as the 721 has not been upgraded with the software patch that the other DVR’s have received.  In addition I am hearing a strong rumor that Dish has discontinued its 625 DVR which is a standard definition DVR.  Soon all the DVR’s Dish will be putting in new customers homes are their high definition DVRs which do not infringe on Tivo’s software patients.

No matter what the decision is I hope that (and I have said it before) Dish Network and Tivo can start working together. While Dish Network’s DVR software is great, some people like the Tivo interface better, if Dish could offer the option to its customer to subscribe to Tivo service on their DVR’s it would draw revenue for both companies.

Glitches for DirecTV

Yesterday the online forums were buzzing with DirecTV customers complaining that their DVRs were locking up and freezing.  The problems ranged from the DVR’s failing to respond to any button pushes, reports of lost recordings, incorrect clock times, favorite’s lists and series links erased and other issues.

The folks at DirecTV were quick to take notice and come up with a fix.  The problem was due to an anomaly in the data stream.  The only way to get rid of the anomaly was to reset the receivers, customers could do this by pressing the red reset button this is located under the door which houses the DirecTV smartcard.  DirecTV also quickly wrote code which would force customers’ receivers to reset automatically and correct the issue.

As of this morning it appears all is back to normal.  Kudos to the tech at DirecTV for quickly fixing this issue.

It’s amazing how much we depend on our DVR’s.