Posts Tagged: "video streaming"

This August, The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) announced that it will be releasing two large Netflix-like streaming video services which will both be available in late 2019 according to a report from The New York Times. One of the networks that Disney intends on creating will offer movies and television shows from all of Disney’s holdings, including the Star Wars franchise produced by Lucasfilm. On the other streaming service there will be a focus on providing sporting events produced by ESPN. In its first year, the ESPN streaming service will broadcast a reported 10,000 regional and national sporting events including baseball, hockey and college sports.

One of the obstacles Comcast has to hurdle in order to attract these high-end buyers is the likelihood of a server malfunctioning and shutting down. This issue interrupts viewing and lessens the overall experience for the user. That is a problem addressed by the technology protected by U.S. Patent No. 8265073, which Comcast filed for in 2006 and was finally published in 2012. Titled Method and System which Enables Subscribers to Select Videos from Websites for On-demand Delivery to Subscriber Television via a Television Network, this patent describes a solution to the problem of provisioning servers being temporarily shut down, which can negatively impact video streams when such a server contains a critical network element. One existing method for streaming media is Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), a method by which users can connect to digital networks. While changes and improvements have been made over the years, a problem still exists when network elements are unable to interact with the associated network. This patent protects a method in which an active-passive model is adopted where the primary server is mirrored with a backup provisioning server, thereby keeping the media running with only slight delays when one server crashes and the backup provisioning server is brought up online.

Facebook is not the only company seeking to provide content to consumers via their own Internet-based platforms. In early May, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) announced a deal with San Francisco-based social media firm Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) to livestream 20 games per year over multiple seasons on the social media platform. The first WNBA game livestreamed on Twitter on Sunday, May 14th, earned 1.1 million viewers, nearly one-third the average audience watching National Football League (NFL) games streamed on Twitter during the 2016-17 season. Seattle-based Internet e-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) will livestream Thursday night NFL games during the 2017-18 season for $50 million, a sum which is reportedly about five times what Twitter paid to broadcast NFL games last year. Twitter’s WNBA deal and Amazon’s NFL deal both include promotional efforts on behalf of the Internet companies to promote either sports league.

On January 4, 2017 Linksys announced it had teamed up with Rivet Networks and effectively brought the Killer Mode technology directly into a router that is needed to prioritize algorithms coming from the computer to the network. But the networking technologies seen in the Linksys WRT32x router demonstrate only one aspect of Belkin International’s developments in this sector. Belkin is the parent company ob Linksys, and its technologies enable better network management for devices including gaming PCs or mobile devices, as can be seen by U.S. Patent No. 9497196 titled IOT Device Environment Detection, Identification and Caching. This patent describes a process in which network devices can determine the status of other devices, such as mobile phones, and continuously update that status through a network.