TiVo said it received a favorable ruling from an International Trade Commission (ITC) judge that Comcast’s X1 platform infringes Rovi’s patents. The company called on Comcast to sign up for a license to the patents.
The ruling must still be approved by the full ITC before TiVo can secure any sanctions against Comcast. Administrative Law Judge MaryJoan McNamara ruled that Comcast infringed on TiVo’s claims made for Patent No. 7,779,011, “Method and system for dynamically processing ambiguous, reduced text search queries and highlighting results thereof”, reports Multichannel.
The judge rejected claims for two other TiVo patents, No. 9,369,741, “Interactive television systems with digital video recording and adjustable reminders”, and No. 7,827,585, “Electronic program guide with digital storage”, and earlier threw out claims on five other patents. Comcast told Multichannel that it was confident the remaining patent claim would be rejected by the full ITC and said it did not see any disruption to its business from the initial ruling.
This is TiVo's second win against Comcast at the ITC. In November 2017, the ITC issued a final ruling that Comcast had infringed two Rovi patents around ‘remote record’ functionality and ordered a sales and import ban on the infringing products. Comcast subsequently elected to remove this feature from its products.
In May this year, the ITC started a third case, looking at whether Comcast infringed six Rovi patents covering the X1 Sports App, multi-room DVR features, and set-top box integrations of apps like Netflix.
