WWE has been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit.
According to Heel by Nature, SITO Mobile, Ltd has filed a lawsuit against WWE for allegedly infringing multiple patents.
The complaint outlines 12 patents owned by SITO Mobile, which they believe WWE is infringing. SITO Mobile is requesting the court award damages determined by a jury trial. SITO Mobile has previously filed patent lawsuits against Hulu and Flo Sports.
From the court documents:
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.
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
You can view the entire court document by clicking here.
