The new ruling brings Dish and EchoStar’s total payments to TiVo to around $400 million in damages and other fees after a five year legal battle. In this latest round, Dish and EchoStar say they tried to work around TiVo’s patents, but a judge ruled that they had failed to do so. The $200 million figure is based on a $2.25 per month royalty for every Dish DVR user, extending from April 2008, when an appeals court reaffirmed TiVo’s patent, to July 1 2009.

It could have been worse. TiVo was looking for nearly $1 billion — or all of Dish’s DVR profits — as it accused Dish and EchoStar of willingly infringing on its patent. The judge ruled that the infringement had been unwilling (in other words, the companies had tried to work around the patent but failed to do so), hence the smaller penalty.

None of this bodes well for AT&T and Verizon, who are also being sued by Tivo for infringing on its “Time Warping” patent.

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Now, to be clear, this data will be anonymous, and TiVo has actually been doing this to some extent for several years. But tomorrow, the company plans to unveil a better challenger to Nielsen, the leader in TV audience data, USA Today reports. This type of data is vital to television advertisers because it dictates their ad sales. And TiVo thinks it can provide better data for more markets by using its 3 million plus subscribers, to dish out data that can be broken down by the second.

TiVo is trying to play up the fact that such data can be useful to not only advertisers, but to television shows themselves. This way, they can see what parts of shows people skip through — so news shows, for example, can better tailor key content. But this is really about the advertisers, who will want to know what ads people are skipping through, and at what times, during what programs. I’ll make this simple: While not all DVR owners may skip through all commercials, I would bet that anyone who took the initiative to buy a TiVo — a separate box that costs a few hundred dollars and requires a subscription fee on top of your cable bill — skips through just about all commercials, period.

This data from TiVo will apparently come from all but the smallest of the 210 television markets. That’s nice, as it’s a lot more than Nielsen, which generally just offers constant in-depth reports for the largest markets. But Nielsen’s data undoubtedly covers a much wider range of the overall population. In fact, that idea led to the most curious line in USA Today’s piece as stated by TiVo’s audience research and measurement general manager, Todd Juenger. He says, that on top of being richer and better educated, TiVo owners tend to be “unfortunately, a little more white” (than the overall population).

Perhaps TiVo should just publish its data directly to Stuff White People Like.

Seriously though, as a former TiVo owner, I feel for the company. It offers a truly great product, but it’s simply hard for most people to justify paying to put yet another box in their increasingly cluttered living rooms — and asking them to pay yet another monthly fee for it. The cable companies DVRs are absolutely dreadful, but they are cheaper, and come in cable boxes.

The company is making some right moves by offering other services, like Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon’s streaming movie service on its boxes, but it still has to give a reason for users to pay a relatively high monthly fee for the TiVo service. TiVo can sell all the data it wants, but unless it can reverse the trend of subscribers leaving the service behind, none of that will matter.

[photo: flickr/flyinace2000]

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Later today, presumably in the afternoon when everyone is awake, they will finally announce the software kit that will turn your PC into a Tivo box. Set to launch on October 15th, the Nero LiquidTV/TiVo PC will retail for $199, but those with a built-in TV tuner can opt for just the software, which will go for $99. The kit also entitles you to a year’s subscription with renewal fees of an additional $99.

Read more…

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In 2004 Tivo successfully sued EchoStar for its Dish Network DVR, which provided very similar functionality to Tivo’s product. EchoStar was ordered to pay Tivo $73.9M in damages. The company has subsequently appealed the ruling a number of times, but has not been successful in getting it overturned.

The Dish Network has advised customers that the latest rulings will have no effect on their DVR service, stating that they have deployed “next-generation DVR software” that will not infringe on Tivo’s patent. The company has also declared that it intends to appeal the latest ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Dish has a lot more lawyer money than TiVo, and it is going to drag this thing out as long as it can.

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection was the first site to report the news.

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Real’s Rhapsody will allow TiVo users to sign up for the $13 per month service and listen to the more than 3.5 million songs from their TiVo DVR streamed on demand.

TiVo has previously inked content distribution deals with Amazon’s Unbox and Podshow.

More at CrunchGear.

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Although the company does not disclose exact figures, a Sling Media spokesperson says the startup has sold “hundreds of thousands” of Slingboxes over the past couple years. So that could be anywhere between 200,000 Slingbox users (which would bring the purchase price to $1,900 per user) and 900,000 (which would come to a purchase price of $422 per user). (Ed. note: I fixed my initial bad math).

Still, that is not the math EchoStar used to justify the purchase. Because EchoStar, which was already a minority investor in the startup, did not buy Sling Media for its puny number of existing customers. It bought Sling Media for its place-shifting technology, which allows people to watch whatever is on their TV from a remote location on their laptop. EchoStar can now integrate that technology into its set-top boxes and has a better chance than Sling Media did to get the number of Slingbox users up well past a million. Another reason behind the deal may be to combine Sling Media with EchoStar’s other technology assets (set-top boxes, satellites), and split off the resulting, strengthened TV-technology group as a separate business, while dressing up its TV subscription service for a sale to AT&T. If that happens, then an independent EchoStar TV technology business would be free to sell place-shifting set-top boxes to rivals as well.

Just as the DVR did not take off until DirecTV and EchoStar started pushing the technology to their own customers, I would expect the same thing to happen with Slingboxes. But instead of EchoStar trying to design an inferior version of a Slingbox and push that on its TV subscribers, as it’s done with DVRs, at least this time it is starting out with the best technology up-front.

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TiVo users have been able to purchase or rent movies from Amazon Unbox since March. Previously this required users to make the purchase on the Amazon website. From today, TiVo Series 2 and 3 users will now be able to browse and buy movies without having to use a computer.

The NY Times noted that TiVo has developed a safeguard so users don’t accidentally order movies, by requiring a five-digit password to complete a transaction

The service contrasts with Apple TV, which requires the use of iTunes to download, buy and then sync content to an Apple TV unit. Apple TV has already been written off by some as a failure amongst the sea of recent Apple success stories; given the continued improvement of competing offerings, it’s probably not a call without some merit. Certainly one would question the need for a stand-alone Apple TV style device that doesn’t record TV nor play DVD’s, when there are a wealth of alternatives, from TiVo style units, HD DVD players, and network DVD players that provide a superior service for a similar or lower cost.

Previous coverage: TiVo and Amazon.

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This is the second time that Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch — you’ll recall that Amazon rolled-out their Unbox service one week prior to Apple rolling out their own service for selling digital movies / TV shows. That didn’t seem to matter, as Apple has rolled over Amazon with digital movie and TV show sales.

This might be another one-week head start that Amazon has to gain some ground with their digital movie / TV show downloads service to the TV, considering the much-anticipated Apple TV is expected to release later this month. However, Apple has all their passionate iPod users (60 million strong) and have also sold millions of digital movies / TV shows that users will easily be able to watch on their new Apple TV device instantly.

Amazon also offers movie rentals, whereas Apple still does not, despite rumors. Amazon appears to offer nearly 1,000 videos for sale and nearly 500 for rental. A movie download to the TiVo appears to take an hour (from one perspective), whereas consumers can still get pay-per-view or video-on-demand movies instantly — however they offer a limited selection of titles.

Competitors loom, with Wal-mart entering the digital movie downloads market last month and others have existed for awhile — Guba, CinemaNow, and Movielink.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. Steve will be at SXSW this weekend if you want to chat about web start-ups.

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After several months of rumors, Amazon and TiVo have partnered to make Amazon Unbox content available from user PCs to their broadband-connected TiVo units.

The service hasn’t fully rolled out yet — a few hundred users are testing now. Plan is to roll-out the full service to all consumers by year end. Also, not all TiVo units work for this ( e.g. DirecTV or Comcast) and not all Unbox content either (e.g. Sony and Disney, yet). Other restrictions include: Mac users still can’t watch Amazon Unbox films on their computers, but are able to download them to TiVos; and limits cover two PCs, two TiVos or one of each — PCs can link with two portable devices. Still, this gives Amazon a horse in the race against Apple, which just started selling their Apple TV product. Now both Apple and Amazon have a way of getting their content into your living room even if you don’t have a PC connected to your television.

TiVo owns a coveted spot in millions of living rooms and has terabytes of aggregated viewing data on millions of consumers — when is someone going to wake up and buy? Could you imagine the targeted ads Google could deliver to the TV based on all that mined data? Or does Yahoo / Microsoft want to get that first-mover advantage and have instant ad inventory on the broadband-connected TV?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

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Amazon Unbox does provide a DVD quality file with each download that can be burned to a DVD as backup but cannot be watched with a DVD player. For more details on Unbox, see our coverage of its launch.

Apple announced its own set top box called iTV at the “Showtime” event. Rumor has it that the company is in talks with Google to, among many things that are possible, allow videos from Google Video to be played on the iTV.

Ultimately it’s probably all a matter of DRM, as any of these files ought to be viewable on any of the set top devices coming to market. Just as the movie studios make DRM demands on the download services, the download services then share their DRM carefully with device makers. You can only imagine how much further along this industry could be if it weren’t tangled up in such matters. Perhaps everyone would be broke and movies would be free, though, it’s hard to say.

Thanks to Steve Poland for the tip.

File trading networks, such as bittorent, are also extremely popular (if sometimes illegal) choices for consumers wanting access to time-shifted television content.

While DVRs are great, content producers and distributors are less than thrilled by the loss in revenue from all those skipped commercials. Also, DVR’d shows cannot be easily transferred to mobile devices or otherwise viewed away from their home television. Some consumers want more flexibility and options.

Enter downloadable television, spearheaded by iTunes.

On October 12 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0 which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes initially offered a selection of several thousand music videos and five TV shows, including most notably ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives, as well as the collection from past seasons. New shows are available 24 hours after the initial broadcast. Since that time, the collection has expanded with NBC Universal, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel shows, and Viacom, in addition to further Disney-owned networks’ shows. iTunes also gives the ability to view Apple’s large collection of movie trailers. Format for purchased Videos is 128 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video.

By January 2006, iTunes offered over 40 television shows for download, including, most recently, additions from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV with episodes of such shows as the Daily Show, Spongebob Squarepants, South Park, and Punk’d. Showtime added some content in February.

The networks, though, are hoping that iTunes will not be the only way people watch TV on their computers. CBS, Fox and ABC are all experimenting with their own direct downloads or streaming.

ABC

ABC is offering streaming versions of a number of its hit shows to viewers within the U.S. for no charge: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. The shows are viewable in 400×700 Flash format. On the plus side, ABC’s offering is browser and platform agnostic, and are free. On the minus side, and these are big ones, you must be online to view the show. You can’t take these with you on a laptop or other device and watch them while on a plane, or otherwise offline. Also, There are a number of short commercials that cannot be skipped. So in the end, ABC is offering a nice way for me to watch time-shifted shows on my PC-enabled living room television, but not much else. See Mike Davidson for more on this.

CBS

CBS is going with downloads, through their CBS On Demand project. Only a single show is currently offered – Survivor – and you must be in the U.S. to use the service. Quality is 640×480 pixels. Shows cost $.99 and must be watched within 24 hours of downloading (again, not a very good option for travelers). You must have a Windows PC to view the shows. They cannot be burned to dvd. Frankly, with all of these limitations I’m surprised they even let you watch the show, period. It’s like they’re begging to fail so that they can say “hey, see, we tried, people don’t want this.” Note that CBS is also experimenting with shows on Google Video.

NBC

NBC is offering a number of shows through iTunes, but has no direct to consumer offering. They offer thirteen shows on iTunes, including The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live, The Apprentice, Law and Order, Scrubs and The Office, as well as a number of vintage shows.

FOX

Fox is shaking things up a bit. In April they announced a six year deal with their affiliates to allow them to show back catalog shows on the internet. They are also starting to roll out downloads of the show “24″ through their Myspace property, but I am unable to find much information on it yet.

SUMMARY

It’s going to be a while before the service models are compelling enough for the world to turn away en masse from today’s TV, but it’s clear we’re at the start of a major disruption that will shake content producers (the networks) and the distributors (cable) to the core.

Nothing is close to challenging iTunes yet for downloadable tv dominance (well, except bittorent and DVRs), and it’s unlikely a single network will be able to do much to overcome them. People want to be able to consume their content in one place, and iTunes does a very good job of allowing that. It’s simple, has some flexibility with regard to moving to a device and the shows do not “expire”. The real competition to iTunes is still to come: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, among others, will have product offering in this space sooner or later. (Note: AOL is already streaming a number of vintage television shows to users).

Business models need to change. Content producers cannot rely on network deals, 30 second advertising and, later, dvd sales, to pull in the revenue. Shows will have to stand on their own, and will probably need to be free for the first few episodes to pull in viewers who may eventually be willing to pay. Frankly, I look forward to the day that a show, ignored by the networks, first decides to launch itself on iTunes and go straight to consumers. The press around it would be overwhelming. The first to do it will have a big advantage.

There is a market for third party service providers, too. Services like Meevee are starting to bridge the gap between providing online television listing information and allowing people to actually view the content on their computers. Cozmo.tv and Brightcove are allowing people to control their Tivo’s through their browser. And how long will it be before MobiTV, which currently streams television to mobile devices, is able contractually to simply flip a switch and offer streaming television direct to a PC? They are already making moves in that direction, and Orb offers a similar, free service.

Note: This article was written with my friend Neil Kjeldsen, a new blogger but longtime writer, and someone who knows the television and film space well. Look for more posts by Neil here on TechCrunch.