WWE Nailed With Lawsuit Over Infringing Streaming Service Patents

Vince McMahon’s company has a lot of things going and streaming video is the way of the future. This is something that WWE jumped on as soon as they could. It is also the subject of a new lawsuit.

WWE is facing a new lawsuit from SITO Mobile, alleging that they infringed on a few patents pertaining to their streaming media. New court documents show that a lawsuit was filed on May 21st according to Heel By Nature.

This new lawsuit alleges that WWE infringed on their streaming media patents. The details are included in the description found within the lawsuit.

WWE streams videos using a network(s) of servers (“WWE Streaming Platform”). WWE uses Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) and/or HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocols to stream video content. MPEG-DASH and HLS are HTTP based adaptive bitrate streaming techniques that enable high quality streaming of media content over the Internet from web servers. The operation of MPEG-DASH and HLS are described in standards documents.

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With MPEG-DASH and HLS, a video may be broken up into thousands of small HTTP-based file segments. Each segment contains a short interval of playback time of the video. The segments are encoded at a variety of different bit rates (speeds). After a video is selected to be streamed, the media player on the subscriber device is provided with a file that informs the player, amongst other things, how to obtain the segments sequentially and how to handle ad breaks (if any). As the video is playing, the subscriber device determines the bit rate that it can handle and requests a segment(s) encoded at that bit rate. The player plays the segments in sequential order and continuously requests segments until the player has received all of the segments that make up the video

The complaint lists twelve patents owned by SITO Mobile. The company believes that WWE infringed on their patents. SITO Mobile is requesting for a jury trial where jurors will then determine the exact amount of damages.

It might be notable that SITO Mobile has previously filed similar lawsuits related to infringing on their patents. Their previous targets included Hulu and Flo Sports.