No doubt TiVo has long since released its proverbial ATRAC codec, but it is so bad now that every time we hear about a TiVo offer, we click on through to find the super lame catch. Of course this time is no different as TiVo is offering up to $100 off a TiVo HD to existing Series 1 or 2 owners. So you probably figured out the catch by now, which is that if you have lifetime on your existing TiVo, you can't transfer it. If you log in and try the site actually suggests you give away your older TiVo or recycle it. It seems that TiVo knows there aren't any alternatives so what are you going to do if you're treated like crap? It's not like there are any comparable acceptable alternatives.

News of another delay should be absolutely no surprise to anyone that's followed the details of this case, as DISH was granted a stay by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit pending its appeal of a $190 million ruling in favor of TiVo which will allow its customers to continue using their DVRs, at least for now. For its part, TiVo repeated its praise of the "thorough and well-reasoned decision finding EchoStar in contempt of court for violating the injunction and awarding further damages" and is confident the ruling will be upheld, again. Did anyone really think this one would just end so easily?

Read - DISH Network and EchoStar Statement Regarding Tivo
Read - TiVo Statement on Decision by U.S. Court of Appeals to Stay Permanent Injunction Issued by District Court in Lawsuit Against EchoStar

For some reason almost all DVRs are like cell phones, they have lots of strings attached. You either need to pay a monthly subscription or you need to get a CableCARD from your provider and give up access to other features your provider offers that you pay for. There are a few exceptions and the newest one is from Dish Network in the way of the DTVPal DVR. It doesn't require a monthly subscription, or even a cable or satellite provider because it works with free over-the-air TV. It does HD, has two tuners, and a 250GB hard drive; all for the reasonable price of $250. If this all sounds good so far, then keep reading because like all things there's a catch.

It seems like Cablevision and others have been trying to roll out "remote storage" network DVRs forever, and now that the Supreme Court has decided against hearing the appeal of the Hollywood studios looking to block it, they should finally be able to deliver as soon as this summer. Of course, there's benefits to having a locally stored copy of I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, but just in case we forgot to queue up a recording, the power went out or suffered some other manner of catastrophe, we'd still have access to all the Lou Diamond Phillips anyone could ask for, and there's really no way the highest court in the land could get in the way of that.

We're pretty big fans of AT&T's U-verse (though, alas, we're not lucky enough to live in an area where we can have it!), and we sort of figured a few days back when the company rolled out some new tweaks to its Total Home DVR that something like this might be on the horizon, and here it is. AT&T's rolled out a free app for the iPhone app store that allows users to access the entire program guide, search for specific shows, and schedule, manage and delete programs and settings. The Mobile Remote Access App -- as it's not-so-creatively called -- sounds like a real winner for those with both U-Verse service and an iPhone... but then, we still communicate primarily with quills and parchment, so what would we know? One more screenshot of the app (plus a video!) after the break.

It's been a long, messy road, but now that TiVo's beaten a victory out of EchoStar in that seemingly-endless DVR patent lawsuit it sounds like the company is trying to exert some muscle -- it's already in talks to bring its service to Time Warner Cable, and sources have told Bloomberg the ultimate plan is to eventually collect royalties from every pay-TV provider in the US. That might sound bullying and even a little trollish, but keep in mind these patents have withstood pretty much every legal challenge EchoStar could throw at them, so TiVo's operating from a position of some certainty here -- especially since it's got license agreements with huge players like Comcast and DirecTV to use as leverage in negotiations as well. Of course, none of this solves any of TiVo's actual problems with its products, and the company's topsy-turvy balance sheet has some analysts thinking its ripe for a buyout by one of the bigs, so things could change dramatically at any minute, but for right now it sounds like your chances of getting the TiVo interface on your cable or satellite company DVR just went up, and that's almost certainly a good thing.

In our world the only thing that stays the same is our desire to discover the next great thing. The cycle starts with new product announcements, which builds to anticipation, and eventually to disappointment once we realize the latest gadget isn't everything we hoped. This is more true in the DVR world than any other category we cover because although DVRs have been around for about 10 years now, it seems little has changed since. This is especially true when it comes to 3rd party DVRs which have been few and far between. In fact we are hard pressed to think of even a hand-full of DVRs that made a single dent in the market. TiVo is the most notable, but far from perfect and ReplayTV was great, but didn't last. Both LG and Sony had an HD DVR out there at one point, but you don't remember them for a reason. It's just a really hard sell to convince people to spend cash up front when their provider will give 'em a box for free. So it should come as no surprise that we couldn't wait to try out the Moxi HD DVR from Diego. We thought, finally a real competitor to TiVo, and now with a real HD interface for our HDTV.

In a move that hopefully goes over better than the jittery mess that was 1080p Flash streaming, TV.com will now allow users to schedule recordings directly to their TiVo. They're not the first or only third party site with support, Zap2it.com is another but combined with the existing community features and streaming video this might be a better option. It should work with any Series2, Series3 or TiVo HD box, just look for the Record to TiVo button on TV.com show pages.

It's a longshot, but DISH mentioned in a court filing Monday that it is still looking for a workaround that would keep its DVR from infringing on TiVo patents, but admitting it "does not know whether a further design-around is even possible." Multichannel News pulled out the one sentence filing, although whether DISH seriously believes it can do dual tuner recording without violating the "Time Warp" patent or is just stalling for time while it looks for an antidote is still unclear.

[Picture courtesy one of many GPS accidents]

One of our favorite rumors rides again, but this time it's Dish that might be interested in buying TiVo. The new twist this time though is the motivation, and we can totally see how Dish would love to make this happen. The problem of course is that TiVo isn't interested in any such shenanigans and has gone as far as to write a poison pill into its bylaws. Our friend Davis Freeberg has been writing about TiVo's poison pill for years and more recently, at about the same time as the latest court decision came down against Dish, he saw some interesting traffic in his web server logs from none other than a Dish Network IP. No clue who the user was, but they spent some time reading up on TiVo's poison pill. Davis is no lawyer, but it is his understanding that if Dish attempted to take over TiVo, it'd cost them about $71 per share -- which comes to about $7.5 Billion. This is about seven times what the stock is actually worth and although we'd be shocked if this happened, we have to admit that crazier things have.

It's the case that never ends -- the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has issued a temporary delay of the injunction and fine handed down yesterday in the EchoStar / TiVo lawsuit while it considers an appeal, meaning that DISH owners with older DVRs won't have to worry about losing their pause-and-rewind functionality at least for now. That pretty much means we're back in stasis with this one, with even more delay to come if the appeal is granted. That's cool, we needed a nap anyway.

We're a bit hesitant to call this one done given the history involved, but a federal judge in Texas has dealt DISH / EchoStar yet another serious blow in its long-standing dispute with TiVo, and this time he's taken a number of other measures that could cause EchoStar to finally rethink its workaround-litigate strategy. The big setback for EchoStar, however, is the one-two punch of $190 million in damages it's been ordered to pay TiVo and an order to disable the "infringing function" on all but 193,000 DVRs now in the hands of subscribers. The judge also found that EchoStar's recently-implemented workaround technology still violated the patent in question and, as a result, he's ordered EchoStar to inform the court before it decides to try its hand at another "design-around" of the infringing patent. For its part, TiVo says that it is "extremely gratified by the Court's well reasoned and thorough decision," while DISH / EchoStar would only say that it plans to appeal the court's decision and file a motion to stay the order with a federal appeals court.

Read - The New York Times, "Court Awards TiVo $190 Million in EchoStar Patent Case"
Read - TiVo Statement on U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Decision

Among the financial details (net loss of $4.1 million, yawn) of today's earnings call, TiVo had big news about its Comcast TiVo product, announcing that remote scheduling will be available this summer in the New England area, the planned Chicago launch is "close," that the cable company will soon offer customers in areas switching to all digital the option of a TiVo HD retail box instead of a digital terminal adapter and in one yet-to-be-named tru2way market, will make TiVo its primary DVR option. That's the word from CEO Tom Rogers, who also said Comcast is going to aggressively roll TiVo out, while its still looking for the "best path" of distribution. Non-Comcast interesting developments? The SeaChange partnership has lead to one independent cable operator, Comporium, offering its service, while the Stop||Watch ratings service is expanding to 300,000 subscribers, 75 times the size of Nielsen's DVR sample. Check the read link for the (.PDF) press release or listen in on TiVo's website for all the info, we're busy pondering a bleep & bloop enabled future for our boring old cable DVR boxes.

Update: The transcript of the call is available on Seeking Alpha [Via Davis Freeberg]

This one's been on the books since September of 2007. Now it looks like the first retail product based on Intel's Canmore System on Chip (SoC), aka the CE 3100, will take its first step into the spotlight at Computex with this "ready-to-market" Mediaconnect TV. The highly customizable Mini ITX device runs a Linux-based Metroconnect OS that supports all the major video codecs and Dobly Digital/DTS decoding over 7.1 channels -- the CE 3100 then acts to hardware accelerate sourced 1080p video stored locally or streamed over DLNA / uPnP from anywhere in the house over fixed gigabit Ethernet. Standard features include a pair of USB 2.0 ports, HDMI 1.3a/component/composite and TOSLINK jacks, an SD/MMC card reader, and up to 2TB of on-board (SATA) storage. The box itself is highly customizable with options to include UMTS/HSUPA radios, DVB T/C/S tuners, Bluetooth (for mouse and keyboard), and 802.11n WiFi to take your media streaming wireless. It even features a webcam of unspecified quality. The built-in web browser with Adobe Flash 9.0 support means all the Hulu you can eat and optional dual DVB-T tuners will give you simultaneous over the air TV reception and recording. It remains to be seen how much of this customization will be made available direct to consumers as opposed to the cable companies and telcos that Metrological will ultimately partner with. Nevertheless, they'll be at Computex next week where we'll be on hand to bring you more detail.

Series 3 and HD TiVo owners have a little bit of newness waiting for them at the TiVo Central Online website in the form of Now Playing and To Do lists for their bleeping and blooping DVRs. After playing around with the new features, we have to admit that while they come in handy for managing TiVo scheduling, but we're hoping that the improvements don't stop there. For example, we keep clicking on entries in the Now Playing list, expecting to get a placeshifted stream (or at least a "Keep until/Delete now" dialog; but the video remains safely locked away on our TiVo. While we're wishing, who do we talk to about getting a guide view that shows only our favorite channels?