The new box also includes two tuners so that you can record two shows at once. This is a much anticipated upgrade for DirecTV subscribers who were promised equipment of this caliber years ago. If you still have the service and you want these capabilities, it’s here and it’s available now.

It’s worth noting that this would have only affected older models of DISH DVRs, and the company said it would work to replace those still in use by customers. Now, here’s what the two parties have worked out, per an announcement released this morning:

Under the terms of the settlement, DISH Network and EchoStar agreed to pay TiVo $500 million, including an initial payment of $300 million with the remaining $200 million distributed in six equal annual installments between 2012 and 2017. TiVo, DISH Network and EchoStar agreed to dismiss all pending litigation between the companies with prejudice and to dissolve all injunctions against DISH Network and EchoStar.

The parties also granted certain patent licenses to each other. TiVo granted DISH Network a license under its Time Warp patent (US Pat. No. 6,233,389) and certain related patents, for the remaining life of those patents. TiVo also granted EchoStar a license under the same ’389 patent and certain related patents, for the remaining life of those patents, to design and make certain DVR-enabled products solely for DISH Network and two international customers. EchoStar granted TiVo a license under certain DVR-related patents for TiVo-branded, co-branded and ingredient-branded products.

“We have tremendous respect for TiVo’s management, and we have always said that regardless of the outcome of the case, there were many ways that we could work together with TiVo,” said Charlie Ergen, Chairman and CEO of DISH Network. “The results of TiVo’s formidable intellectual property enforcement program speak for themselves, and consequently, we are pleased to put this litigation behind us and move forward. Additionally, we believe that our agreement with TiVo provides us a competitive advantage as one of the few multichannel operators with rights to operate under TiVo’s Time Warp patent, which ultimately will allow us to enhance the performance of our award-winning DVRs. We look forward to continuing to offer DISH Network customers the most choices in video service.”

“We are extremely pleased to reach an agreement with DISH Network and EchoStar which recognizes the value of our intellectual property,” said Tom Rogers, president and CEO of TiVo. “The compensation from this settlement, including the resulting reduction in legal expenditures, puts TiVo in an enviable financial and strategic position. This settlement, which brings the total compensation paid by DISH Network for use of TiVo’s ’389 patent family to over $600 million, demonstrates the significant return afforded to our shareholders by diligent enforcement of TiVo’s intellectual property rights. Those efforts will aggressively continue with other parties.”

Interestingly, the DISH and TiVo have formed a partnership in which they will work together to promote Blockbuster services (the company was recently acquired by DISH). “We are excited to work with TiVo to help develop our Blockbuster video service,” said Ergen. “Resolving the patent infringement case allows us to further engage with TiVo on a variety of exciting strategic initiatives, like Blockbuster, where we are uniquely positioned to collaborate.”

It will be interesting to see how another DISH collaboration – one with Google develops in the coming months. Recent reports indicate that Google is working on a new version of Google TV, which may be displayed as early as next week, at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference.

DISH was a launch partner for Google TV, announced at last year’s Google I/O event. Since its launch, sales of Google TV devices have been less than impressive. You must remember, however, that Google TV is a platform, as opposed to a device. If Google can continue to make the right partnerships, it may be harder to count the platform as dead in the water. If Google is able to follow Netflix’s lead (or even that of its own Android mobile OS) and get Google TV on a wide range of devices, it should have a better adoption rate. Android integration is supposed to get ramped up, so that should help. It could, in turn, help DISH Network as well.

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%.

 On TiVo, users can create a new free Pandora account, or sign-in with an existing Pandora accounts and access their current station on television. Users can access Pandora stations created on TiVo or any other platform where they listen to Pandora, including PCs, smartphones and other connected devices.

“The Pandora application brings additional music customization to the all-in-one TiVo box," said Jim Denney, VP and GM of Product Marketing for TiVo.

"With Pandora now available on TiVo Premiere, we offer customers even more options when it comes to music including personalized on-demand radio, audio podcasts, music videos, music from your PC, and more through the TV and with just one remote."

Pandora joins TiVo’s current musical lineup of Rhapsody, Live365, Music Choice and songs connected from a PC or Mac music library.

TiVo Premiere will sell for $300 and will have the ability to hold up to 45 hours of HD content or up to 400 hours of standard definition content.  TiVo Premiere XL will retail for $500 and hold up to 150 of HD content or 1,350 hours of standard definition.

Premiere’s search functionality offers user the ability to find content on cable, YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and Blockbuster On Demand.

Content is organized by category or topic with a full-screen menu that includes a display of movie posters and TV show logos. Users can also browse by specific movie collections or TV shows such as those that won an Oscar or an Emmy.

Premiere is built on Adobe Flash software and includes an on-screen disk space meter that shows how much rooms is left to record, a built in 30 second scan, along with a new video window which allows users to watch content while navigating the TiVo menus.

"TiVo Premiere is your new cable box, it’s your movie box, it’s your web box, and music box; it’s the one box that can give you access to almost anything you want, whenever you want it," said TiVo’s President and CEO Tom Rogers.

"We’ve taken millions of pieces of content and organized it for you in a way that makes so much sense you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it."
 

Mike Steib, Google’s director of emerging platforms, explained the arrangement in a formal statement.  "This deal with TiVo will give advertisers access to even more anonymized viewership data, making Google’s dataset one of the best in the industry," Steib said.  "Advertisers can use this data to understand which audiences and ads are most effective, which we think will ultimately lead to more relevant ads for viewers."

This development is likely to result in heavier use of Google TV Ads, too.  After all, the more data Google can provide, the less risky its program will seem, perhaps causing marketers to embrace it over alternatives or give TV ads a shot for the very first time.

What’s a little harder to discern is how TiVo benefits from the arrangement.  Presumably Google paid more than a couple of dollars for access to TiVo users’ data; all Todd Juenger, TiVo’s vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement, would say is that this acts "to help the media industry better understand the effectiveness of ad campaigns in an evolving TV landscape."

Anyway, Google TV Ads is supposed to be able to reach 96 million households as things stand, and has served over 100 billion ad impressions to date.

Related Articles:

> Google Gets A New Real-Time Infrastructure For Display Ads

> Google To Get More Interactive With Mobile Video Ads

> Google Ad Planner Gets Several New Enhancements

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.

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.
 

Users will have access to about 10,000 movies and TV shows that can be purchased or rented on TiVo Series 2, Series 3 or HD series device. Films on Blockbuster’s OnDemand service will be available for $2 to $4 for rental and purchased movies start at around $10.

Jim Keyes

Blockbuster stores will also sell TiVo DVRs and make them available for purchase online at blockbuster.com. The move gives TiVo a new distribution outlet and makes the brand more visible to consumers. Blockbuster and TiVo have plans to implement a cross-marketing campaign.

"Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our OnDemand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster Chairman and CEO.

"Regardless of a film’s availability – through VOD or on DVD – we want to work with TiVo to provide their subscribers unprecedented access to movie content."

The companies plan on having the Blockbuster OnDemand service integrated into TiVo DVRs in the second part of 2009.
 

Netflix already streams movies and television shows to Roku devices, Xboxes, and Blu-Ray players from LG and Samsung. Now with TiVo in the mix, they’ll reach an even wider audience, although Tivo may really be the one that needs the competitive boost. Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee writes:

Perhaps TiVo needs Netflix more than the other way around. TiVo has been hemorrhaging subscribers over the past year and a half. According to TVbytheNumbers.com, the DVR maker had 3.6 million subscribers in July of 2008, the same level they had in July, 2005.

Netflix on TiVo will be available to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL owners. The two companies will start testing the new service today in “several thousand” U.S. households, and anticipate it to be widely available in early December (read: “Hey! Please ignore your cable DVR and buy a TiVo this holiday.”).

The Netflix TiVo service will become widely available in December (just in time for the holidays?), but will of course require users to have a Netflix subscription. If they want to make this really enticing to those who aren’t already subscribed, they might want to consider kicking some content partnerships into gear like they did with Starz.

They’re still going to have to beef up their streaming catalogue before this truly becomes a draw to outsiders. For those of us who are already Netflix subscribers, more ways to access the content are always welcome.