There was a payout in the Dish-tivo lawsuit on Sept. 4 of this year. This lawsuit is about the timewarp infringement, and Dish had to pay $2.50 per DVR that infringed on the Tivo patents. The Dish DP 501 was specifically sited in the lawsuit.
Sometime after Sept 13 my DP 501 timer functions stopped working. I can pause, rewind, fast-forward live TV. I can only record shows if I manually start the recording and manually stop the recording. Any attempt to set up a timer either to start or stop the recording after the show is over does not function. There is no error messages etc... The recording icon does not appear in the guide for the specified show, and no timer events are set up. This is a dvr that I own outright and do not lease from Dish
I am a firmware engineer and in my opinion, Dish has disabled my timer features via software download. I know people who work on Dish equipment and have rooms full of them. They indicated that Dish could easily do this.
My concern is that Dish is trying to reduce their future liability with Tivo, by slowly disabling this feature, thus eliminating the offending units in their customer base. I also know that eventually Dish wants to go to mpeg4 and would like to eliminate as many of the old mpeg2 units in its customer base. I'm sure newer units take an mpeg 4 signal and scale it down for standard definition tuners. The mpeg 4 allows them to broadcast more channels.
Have you heard about any other people experiencing this?
Six months ago I called Dish to try and see if I could get a deal to upgrade to HD. They basically told me to pound sand. As a 10 year customer, I was told that no deals were available and I just should sign another contract and get the unit. I declined at that time.
This week when I called about my non-functioning unit, I was told it was broken and I could upgrade like any other customer. I then told them I was informed about the lawsuit and the capabilities of Dish to disable the timer functionality in my unit. I was insistent and eventually then told me to contact "special services".
Today I talked to special services and they would admit nothing (of course you don't admit liability) and they were finally willing to deal with me. They would upgrade me to a brand new 722 HD DVR dual room unit for free. I would pay no monthly leasing fee for the life of the contract. However I had to commit to a 24 month contract. I refused, and then they offered an additional $12 savings per month for the next 12 months. They would not budge on the 24 month commitment. This just seems very suspicious to me. I felt like the abused wife going back to the abuser.
Have you heard of any others in a similar situation? If I was Charlie I would randomly target older DVRs and over the next six months selectively disable so that their appears to be no obvious pattern. I.E. You do not want to disable the timer feature in all the old units in one city at once. The firmware that is downloaded could be easily be spot beamed to DVRs over a period of time. The firmware could check the serial number of the DVR and if it was on the list, set a bit in non-volatile memory to disable the "timewarp" function. That way you could update the DVRs in a certain region over multiple days, weeks, months etc... to slowly break them. Thus causing the individual to think his unit is broken, and require them to get a new unit, monthly leasing fees, and a new 24 month commitment. Sounds crazy, but Dish has a lot of old units in service, thus a big liability for continued TIVO payments. I can easily see Charlie and the bean counters doing this.
Sometime after Sept 13 my DP 501 timer functions stopped working. I can pause, rewind, fast-forward live TV. I can only record shows if I manually start the recording and manually stop the recording. Any attempt to set up a timer either to start or stop the recording after the show is over does not function. There is no error messages etc... The recording icon does not appear in the guide for the specified show, and no timer events are set up. This is a dvr that I own outright and do not lease from Dish
I am a firmware engineer and in my opinion, Dish has disabled my timer features via software download. I know people who work on Dish equipment and have rooms full of them. They indicated that Dish could easily do this.
My concern is that Dish is trying to reduce their future liability with Tivo, by slowly disabling this feature, thus eliminating the offending units in their customer base. I also know that eventually Dish wants to go to mpeg4 and would like to eliminate as many of the old mpeg2 units in its customer base. I'm sure newer units take an mpeg 4 signal and scale it down for standard definition tuners. The mpeg 4 allows them to broadcast more channels.
Have you heard about any other people experiencing this?
Six months ago I called Dish to try and see if I could get a deal to upgrade to HD. They basically told me to pound sand. As a 10 year customer, I was told that no deals were available and I just should sign another contract and get the unit. I declined at that time.
This week when I called about my non-functioning unit, I was told it was broken and I could upgrade like any other customer. I then told them I was informed about the lawsuit and the capabilities of Dish to disable the timer functionality in my unit. I was insistent and eventually then told me to contact "special services".
Today I talked to special services and they would admit nothing (of course you don't admit liability) and they were finally willing to deal with me. They would upgrade me to a brand new 722 HD DVR dual room unit for free. I would pay no monthly leasing fee for the life of the contract. However I had to commit to a 24 month contract. I refused, and then they offered an additional $12 savings per month for the next 12 months. They would not budge on the 24 month commitment. This just seems very suspicious to me. I felt like the abused wife going back to the abuser.
Have you heard of any others in a similar situation? If I was Charlie I would randomly target older DVRs and over the next six months selectively disable so that their appears to be no obvious pattern. I.E. You do not want to disable the timer feature in all the old units in one city at once. The firmware that is downloaded could be easily be spot beamed to DVRs over a period of time. The firmware could check the serial number of the DVR and if it was on the list, set a bit in non-volatile memory to disable the "timewarp" function. That way you could update the DVRs in a certain region over multiple days, weeks, months etc... to slowly break them. Thus causing the individual to think his unit is broken, and require them to get a new unit, monthly leasing fees, and a new 24 month commitment. Sounds crazy, but Dish has a lot of old units in service, thus a big liability for continued TIVO payments. I can easily see Charlie and the bean counters doing this.
