TIVO Jumps 15% On Dish Settlement; DISH Up 8%

By Tiernan Ray

Shares of TiVo (TIVO) are up $1.46, or 15%, at $11.03 after the company said it will receive $500 million from Dish Network (DISH) and Echostar (SATS) as settlement for a patent infringement suit begun by TiVo in January of 2004, and that has been through round after round of judgments and appeals.

Dish had been found on April 20th to be in contempt of a court order to shut down its digital video recorder service, a ruling the company had vowed to fight. But some on the Street speculated at the time Dish would seek a settlement to prevent the shut-down.

An estimate by Sanford Bernstein had implied the settlement could be a billion dollars or more, so today’s deal appears to be not as extreme as might have been expected.

Dish shares are up $2.08, or 8%, at $27.12. Shares of Echostar, which was spun out of Dish in 2007 as a set-top box maker, were unchanged at $37.08.

Separately, Dish reported Q1 revenue of $3.22 billion and $1.22 per share in EPS, missing the average $3.23 billion estimate on the top line but beating the 68-cent average EPS estimate. Dish gained 58,000 subscribers in the quarter on a net basis, it said, for a total of 14.2 million subscribers.