DISH Network announced a partnership with ViaSat Inc. at CES today to bring next-generation satellite broadband to homes across America bundled with their satellite television service. The company also announced a new DVR system that will bring impressive storage and recording abilities to their service.

The new satellite broadband service, called DISH Broadband, is the most appealing new option just because it’s the fastest satellite offered yet in the United States and it’s squarely aimed at rural Americans who can’t get access to broadband Internet.

“This is one more example of DISH meeting the needs of consumers,” DISH CEO Joe Clayton said. “The market potential for this new Internet service is substantial given the nearly eight million to 10 million mostly rural American households that are unserved and millions more left with slower broadband alternatives.”

The service will cost $79.98 per month with an installation starting at $99. ViaSat will handle the satellite delivery services while DISH will handle the billing and tech support.

During the same conference, DISH also took out time to announce their new set-top boxes Hopper and Joey. The Kangaroo names are intentional as that is the mascot for their new devices.

The Hopper is the main unit DVR that features three satellite TV tuners, a 2TB hard drive that can store up to 2,000 hours of video content, bluetooth for linking to devices like wireless headphones and picture-in-picture for watching any two channels at the same time.

The Joey is the smaller set-top box that connects to the Hopper unit. This allows for the most interesting feature of the new set-top box in that it can deliver up to four different on-demand or recorded shows to four rooms in the house. This essentially allows every member of the family to watch something different any time they please.

The other big feature of Hopper is PrimeTime Anytime which records every PrimeTime television show on every major network. This also means that the Hopper DVR can record up to six shows at once.

The Hopper will also offer the usual plethora of TV apps like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, photo sharing and games.

While the new Internet service is definitely appealing, especially to those in rural communities, it’s the new DVR and set-top boxes that create the most excitement. It’s hard not to be in love with a system that can record and play back that many programs simultaneously throughout a household.

For most, online video is just the “big DVR in the sky“, as CEO of Revision3, Jim Louderback, recently told us. People visit sites like Hulu, CBS, TV.com, etc. to play catchup, because that’s where you go when you’ve missed them the night before. Louderback went on to say:

“There is this whole other part of online video where people are trying to create stuff that looks like television. Like comedies, dramas, news… but that’s done at less of a budget or more focused and targeted and the people doing it are able to be more experimental. There is a lot of experimentation that can happen with video when you break out of that structure… when you blow up that bottle that it’s contained in.”

So is the experimentation with online video a good thing? In this case yes. Louderback says that we’re seeing more professional stuff going in, it’s easier to create, the tools and compression are getting better, and it gives talented people the ability to go out and cover things in their own way.

During his interview with WebProNews at the Blogworld Expo, Louderback stated:

“You couldn’t do this on TV, but you can do it here, build an audience and make it as long as it needs to be. You don’t have to hit a network timeout, you don’t have to hit a particular advertising break, if I’m boring… you cut me off and we’re done. I think that’s great because it allows the creativity of people before that had to be focused. They had to go to New York / L.A., you had to pay your dues, you had to sit within these rigid formats, and now you can do it in Lexington, Kentucky.”

For the most part, network TV and online video are both getting better and better… but they’re both still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up and where they should intersect.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

DISH Network subscribers, before you freak out, you should know that this only applies to some older models, so there’s a good chance it won’t affect you at all. While DISH intends to fight this further, and if necessary, it also says it will work to replace the older models, with new non-infringing models.

DISH released the following statement:

“DISH Network and EchoStar are pleased that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously vacated the district court’s contempt ruling regarding our software design around. We are disappointed, however, that the Federal Circuit in a 7-5 split decision has affirmed the district court’s ruling on the disablement question. We intend to seek review of that part of the decision by the United States Supreme Court and seek a stay of the injunction while doing so. We also will be making a motion to dissolve the injunction based on TiVo’s recent representations to the Patent and Trademark Office substantially limiting the scope of the claims at issue in this case. Existing DISH Network customers with DVRs are not immediately impacted by these recent developments. The disablement ruling covers only certain older generation MPEG2 DVRs. We have already upgraded many of these customers and, if we are unsuccessful in obtaining a stay, we will work as quickly as possible to upgrade the remaining customers to our current generation DVRs, as these are not at issue in the ruling.”

TiVo also offered a statement:

“We are pleased that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sitting en banc affirmed the district court’s finding of contempt and award of sanctions against EchoStar for failing to comply with the district court’s injunction. This marks the second time that the district court’s contempt ruling has been upheld by the Court of Appeals. We look forward to the permanent injunction against EchoStar and Dish Network finally being enforced with respect to the DVRs they must now disable. This ruling also paves the way for TiVo to receive substantial damages and contempt sanctions regarding the DVRs that EchoStar and Dish Network failed to disable. With respect to the remand of the infringement provision of the District’s Courts order, we intend to pursue the most rapid path to resolution. We will continue our efforts to protect our intellectual property from further infringement by EchoStar and Dish Network.”

TiVo investors seem to be pleased. At the time of this writing, TiVo stock is up 35.84% in afternoon trading. DISH investors, not so much: -0.80%.

Will you be downloading the TiVo for BlackBerry app today? Let us know.

Here is the app description from BlackBerry’s site:

"With TiVo for BlackBerry smartphones you can access your channel listings and program your favorite shows from your BlackBerry smartphone. Your smartphone functions just like a TiVo remote control, so you can browse by category, popular shows, daily picks and more."

TiVo for BlackBerry features:

• Program what you like to watch from virtually anywhere
• Browse quickly with an easy-to-navigate menu with a familiar TiVo look and feel
• Scroll through your channels listings directly from your smartphone
• Search for what you want to watch by title, keyword & actor

TiVo for BlackBerry system requirements:

• A wireless data service plan from your wireless service provider
• An active Series2 or Series3 standalone TiVo Digital Video Recorder (DVR)
• A subscription to TiVo service
• 355KB of available memory on your smartphone
• BlackBerry® Device Software v4.2 or higher

Download TiVo for BlackBerry through your phone browser here.

Download TiVo for BlackBerry through BlackBerry App World here.

Henry Blodget penned a column over at Ad Age that can be summed up neatly in its headline “Sorry, There’s No Way to Save the TV Business; It Should Take Its Cues From What Happened to Newspapers”.

The traditional TV industry — cable companies, networks and broadcasters — is where the newspaper industry was about five years ago: in denial.

If this is even half true the folks on the TV side of the ledger better wake up and smell the erosion. The erosion of their leverage, profits and influence is taking place but it is believed that the arrogance that led to the dismantling of the newspaper industry is just as active in the TV world.

Specifically, the TV industry’s attitude is the same as the newspaper industry’s attitude was circa 2002 to 2003: Stop calling us dinosaurs. We get digital; we’re growing our digital businesses; we’re investing in digital platforms; people still recall ads even when they fast-forward through them on DVRs; there’s no substitute for TV ads. And traditional TV isn’t going away: Just look at our revenue and profits!

Blodget posits that the Internet still represents such a small percentage of profits and revenue of TV today but as it continues to grow the tide will quickly turn. As a result, the traditional broadcast industry will buckle and eventually crumble under the weight of its own in cost structure. Sounds painful.

So why is TV still successful? The old model may still have some legs but it is certainly aging out fast. Less and less people are dependent on TV of their information and entertainment. A quick comparison shows the following:

Television Depends On

1. Few options at home other than TV
2. No way to get video content other than TV
3. Only broadcast, cable and satellite options to get TV content
4. Choke points for delivery give inordinate control to those who own the access points

Reality Is

1. More and more simple fun options including games, Internet, social media etc.
2. New ways to get traditional TV content like Hulu, YouTube, iTunes etc.
3. More options for video content including telcos and cable companies providing broadband
4. The Internet is everywhere. You can connect more easily, more often than ever and that will only get better

So how has the TV industry responded?

Thus far, the TV industry has reacted to these changes the way most people would: by trying to port its existing model to the new world and maintain its hold on power and money. This is why we’re getting so many ridiculous, consumer-unfriendly TV solutions

These solutions include, but are not exclusive to, market-based control over what can or can’t be watched, single episode downloads that expire after 24 hours and time shifting of popular shows.

So Blodget’s conclusion is as you may have guessed; TV is headed for the gallows and a slow death from their own ignorance and arrogance.

You won’t have five channels, or 50 channels, or 500 channels. You’ll have millions of channels. You’ll be able to watch anything you want, live or taped. You’ll be able to watch it wherever you want — TV, computer, mobile device. You won’t have to sorry about “slinging” video content around or programming your DVR. You’ll just plug a pipe (internet) into a box (device) and watch.

So all of folks in TV land better take heed. The same day that you reach for your morning paper that no longer exists at your desk in the corporate office could be the same day that your control is handed over your viewers and they leave you for greener pastures. Then what?

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This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon; usually at least one AI contestant blows up the search trends the day after a performance. However, there’s another reason everybody’s looking for this performance: When the show ran long, countless DVRs quit recording.

Lambert was the last to perform, and according to reports this morning, his performance was so good even Simon Cowell gave him a standing ovation. That would have been interesting to see for lots of people, including me. Of course, one can find the performance on YouTube, the world’s defacto I-missed-it-on-TV destination.

I haven’t seen it yet myself. I have to wait till I get home because my wife hasn’t seen it yet either, because our DVR cut it off last night. (Lame, I know, but I’ll get in trouble for watching without her.)

My kid, in meltdown mode.

Now, I have a legitimate excuse for DVRing, as if I need one. AI comes on right around my six-month-old’s bedtime. Only thing is, she’s an insomniac baby and doesn’t like to go to sleep and throws a nice nuclear fit during American Idol or whatever happens to be playing on the TV that I want to enjoy or at least be able to hear. So we pause the TV until the meltdown’s over.

Other people DVR for a number of other reasons, and every single one of them missed the final performance last night because the live show went over its allotted timeslot. There’s likely a logical explanation for this but the conspiracy theory version is way more fun. The logical explanation for this is that four judges is one too many and they wasted too much time letting Paula Abdul talk.

But it happened last year, too, and it’s happened a few times this year, and you’d think they’d get their timing down a bit better. So here’s what I think is really going on:

Advertisers are paying half a million dollars per 30 second spot and aren’t so thrilled with the DVR crowd zooming past their sponsorships. Maybe it’s all a ploy to punish DVR users and coerce them into watching the actual live broadcast in actual real live time. It’s a silent criticism that says: See what happens when you don’t watch our commercials? You miss the best part of the night.

And you know they’re not going to fix your TiVo so you can actually set it to go over a few minutes. Nope, you have to watch the ballgame in real time or you’ll miss that spectacular shot.

So, uh, what does the online marketer get out of this lesson? Well, if you’re looking for a traffic boost—and if your site is relevant of course—a good strategy could be live-blog a live broadcast so that all those DVR conspiracy victims who go online looking for answers can find them (and you). Make sure you tweet it, Facebook it, MySpace it, Friendfeed it, etc. to get the real time search crowd, too. I would say record and post on YouTube, but that’s a copyright violation.
 

This means that you very well may be screwed if you use Dish Network and may be seeing your DVR go away very soon. It also means that TiVo gets to keep at least $94 million in damages from Dish and possibly up to $200 million depending on the judge.

Today’s courts decision is the final decision and means that Dish Network can no longer appeal their loss to TiVo.

It is unlikely that TiVo would negotiate with Dish going forward to allow them to use TiVo’s patented DVR technology. Instead TiVo will enjoy the windfall from the company as well as be able to use Dish as an example when negotiating with other companies.

Two weeks ago on an analysts conference call TiVo CEO Tom Rogers said as much:

"I would say based on our experience with litigation, the cost of litigation are far less than the returns that we are seeing just from the cap side of this equation and I don’t think people have seen the end of what the cap side of that equation is, but just on the basis of damage award, what we’ve spent versus what we’ve gotten back, its been a great business move.

But again, my hope would be that the perception of what we’ve achieved and the value of our intellectual property and the enforcement of an injunction and what the implications of that are will help us significantly to drive forward broader distribution deals than do so without having to litigate."

My guess is that TiVo will use the muscle and threat behind this recent injunction to force Time Warner, one of the last operators to hold out, to do a deal with TiVo.

Update: TiVo has now issued a direct statement on their website:

"We are extremely pleased that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit today denied EchoStar’s petition for a rehearing en banc, upholding the Court’s unanimous ruling in our favor on January 31, 2008, in EchoStar’s appeal of the district court judgment of patent infringement, full award of damages and an order for the injunction to be reinstated.

Today’s ruling brings us closer to resolution of EchoStar’s infringement and reconfirms the strength of TiVo’s Time Warp patent, which is in addition to the other benefits TiVo has to offer. We look forward to full enforcement of our rights in the near term."

Comments

DVRs were made popular by TiVo but there is a trend that consumer’s video service provider is becoming the main supplier of time-shifting technology to people in the form of an advanced set-top box.

"The market for DVR is fairly mature," said Michael Wolf, research director at ABI Research. "While just a few years ago many consumers still did not have a firm grasp of the benefit DVRs would bring them, today the concept of DVR and time-shifting is fairly well understood."

"That being said, adoption levels are still fairly dependent on service provider rollouts and whether consumers are interested in paying additional fees for the benefits of a DVR."

The survey found that both TiVo and service provider DVR customers are just as likely to skip most commercials. Almost four out of five TiVo customers and over 82 percent of service provider DVR customers said they skip all or most commercials. Both groups are likely to record a substantial amount of TV per day, with close to half of TiVo owners saying they record two or more hours per day and 43 percent of service provider DVR owners record a similar amount of shows.

"Our research has found that behavior in usage of DVRs is similar regardless of who provides it, or the demographic profile of the user," said Wolf. "While there are slight variations in usage based on age and income, once you put the technology in their hands the vast majority of consumers show similar behavior."

The patent applies to shows watched on a DVR days, weeks and even months later, where the ads recorded may be for sales that have passed and movies that have left theatres, with the system replacing the expired ads with newer ads.

Frankly, its a brilliant patent, and could represent the long tail of network TV advertising finally having a means of existing. Because television always has been a broadcast medium, ads are always seen by the entire audience, making ads during highly-watched programming enormously expensive, and inaccessible to smaller companies and ad budgets.

With this system, all the ads can be served locally, by the DVR, letting the entire audience see different ads, and thus let advertisers bid on a portion of the audience.

Even live programming could use this patent, replacing the regular ads with bidded, targeted, long-tail ads.

Early adopters could see ads for internet startups that would normally never buy TV ads; kids would see ads for toys and junk food; soccer moms would see ads for food and clothing sales; lawyer dad could see ads for suits; teenage boy would see ads for video games. Split up the audience, and you could save TV advertising.

Why do users skip TV ads? Because most of them are useless, broadcast to everybody and reaching nobody!

I don’t like car commercials (unless they have cool music), or yeast infection cream, or Tickle Me Elmo, or makeup; and every time I see those ads I want to skip commercials entirely. If I knew that Microsoft was serving me ads, and that those ads would be targeted to me every damn time, I’d want to see what was going on.

Broadcast ads used to work, but the audience is getting more savvy and technology is skipping ahead. Fix the ad system, or the $60 billion+ industry will dissapear.

Google is working hard to solve this problem, but Microsoft already has the technology and infrastructure to roll this out to Media Center users. Get the system running and successful, get the networks on board, and you can expand it to the other companies.

The money is in the platform. Use Media Center for testing, but own the ad platform on your competitors as well. Nail this one down, and Microsoft will finally be going somewhere in the ad world.

(via SEW)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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This week, they rereleased the product, rebranded, completely for free. Yahoo Go TV lets you view or share photos, watch video, listen to music, and, if you have a TV tuner, record and play back television. No cost for the download, no cost for guide listings. Pretty cool.

For the DVR functions, you’ll need one of these tuners:

• ATI TV Wonder Elite
• ATI HDTV Wonder
• AverMedia UltraTV 1500 MCE
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2
• NVidia Dual TVmce

That fourth one? That’s my tuner, so I might try it out eventually, see how it measures up to Windows Media Center. If, for one reason or the other, you won’t or can’t get Media Center, Yahoo’s service seems like a great deal, as long as you don’t mind the purple-heavy interface.

One problem: Yahoo Go TV is only for U.S. users. However, Amit Agarwal explains how anyone on Earth can use it. Read his instructions, but basically it involves blocking the program from the internet, which is a trade-off in features.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

Visit the InsideGoogle blog.