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Tivo's Dish-licious treat: $400+ million and counting
March 29, 2010. By Arnold Rapinan

Tivo dishing out Dish

I love underdog or "david-vs-goliath" stories like this one because it's a great reminder that the "small guys" can go againts the "big guys" and win. The image above pretty much summed up the long court battle between Tivo vs. Dish Network & Echostar about DVR technology. While Tivo beat Dish on every court battle thus far, Dish continously bleed by paying hundreds of millions of cash to Tivo because of its stubborness to fight a losing and costly battle. Dish has already paid Tivo $100+ million, and $300 million more on the way plus the possible treble damages that the court may apply. When this is all said and done, I suspect Dish will end up paying Tivo almost $1 billion (if not more) in fees and royalties. Dish could have just bought Tivo at a cheaper price several years ago (or maybe not because of Tivo's poison pill). Oh, wait, there is a recent rumor that Dish may buy Tivo.

To date, this article is probably the clearest update on where we are at on this case: Dish Faces April 30 Deadline In TiVo Case. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Dish Network has until April 30 to settle its years-long patent litigation with TiVo, or -- barring an unlikely rehearing of an appeals court's ruling -- the satellite operator will be forced to disable millions of customer DVRs."

While Dish had already announced that they will file for an en bank hearing (Dish has less than 10% probability of being granted for an en bank hearing), I suspect that the CAFC will deny it within a month of Dish filing. So what else can Dish do to delay this fiasco should they be denied with the en bank hearing? Well, they can file their last appeal with SCOTUS (Dish, good luck with that!). Since Dish is running out of time and can't delay this case much further, maybe this time, just maybe, Charlie may come to his senses and settle with Tivo. I wonder if AT&T and Verizon will make a deal with Tivo or slug it out in court just like Dish did? Time will tell and we shall see. For now, we are entering round 11 of 12 of this fight, and this fight reminds me of the Pacquiao vs. Cotto bout in which the smaller Pacquiao dominated the entire fight.