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Dish Network, EchoStar will pay TiVo $500 million to settle DVR lawsuit


Dish Network, EchoStar and TiVo have come to a settlement on their long running patent dispute (since2006) that will see the satellite company pay $500 million to settle all ongoing litigation. We stopped covering the various court judgements in this case last year as each side continued to file one stay and injunction after another, but this time it's finally over. The most recent court judgement came April 20th in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and found EchoStar in contempt of an earlier injunction despite modifications to its DVR software. The companies have licensed certain patents to each other, including the infamous Time Warp patent that was at the heart of the dispute. Details are in the press release after the break, but TiVo's scored an upfront $300 million cash payment (Dish Network is also reporting today it added 58,000 subscribers and had a net income of $549 million last quarter, we guess there was some loose change rolling around after its Blockbuster and DBSDpurchases), with the remaining $200 million to be paid out between 2012 and 2017.

Now that the lawyers are out of the picture we wonder if we'll see any TiVo technology on Dish boxes or if a few hundred million in cash is enough to speed up the pace of updates for the Premiere. Interestingly, the press release noted Dish "work with TiVo to help develop our Blockbuster video service" so perhaps the ties between the rental company and TiVo played a part in seeing this dispute come to an end. TiVo's conference call mentioned the marketing agreement to promote Blockbuster's digital service and also how this settlement demonstrates the strength of its patent to other companies it's in litigation with -- that means you Microsoft, AT&T and Verizon.
sourceTiVo, Dish Q1 results

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