Fandango Accused by IP Licensing Company of Infringing Media Streaming Patents

Helios Streaming, LLC and IdeaHub, Inc. have filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the popular online movie ticket sale and media streaming platform, Fandango Media, LLC, for patent infringement involving four patents, alleging that Fandango infringed its media streaming-related patents.

IdeaHub is the assignee and owner of the patents-in-suit and Helios—an “Intellectual Property Research and Licensing Service Company” characterized by Unified Patents as a non-practicing entity—holds the exclusive license and rights to assert them. The patents are U.S. Patent Nos. 10,270,830 (the ’830 patent); 10,313,414 (the ’414 patent); 10,356,145 (the ’145 patent); and 10,362,130 (the ’130 patent), (the “Asserted Patents”) all of which claim “technologies for providing adaptive HTTP streaming services using metadata of media content.” Specifically, the Asserted Patents claim technologies fundamental to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), a media-streaming model for delivering media content.

MPEG-DASH technologies, including those of the claimed inventions of the Asserted Patents, facilitate high-quality streaming of media content by breaking media content—a movie, for example—into smaller parts that are each made available at a variety of bitrates. As a user plays back downloaded parts of the media content, the user’s device employs an algorithm to select subsequent media parts with the highest possible bitrate that can be downloaded in time for playback without causing delays in the user’s viewing and listening experience.

According to the complaint, Fandango infringed at least claims 8 and 11 of the ’830 patent, titled “Apparatus and Method for Providing Streaming Content Using Representations” by “selling, offering to sell, making, using, and/or providing and causing to be used streaming media content in accordance with the MPEG-DASH standard (the “Accused Instrumentalities”), including one or more videos on demand (VOD),” such as those available on its website.

The plaintiffs argued that Fandango’s Accused Instrumentalities perform the patented method of “providing media content performed by a server or multiple servers.” For example, when the media content “Bumblebee” is selected from the videos available at https://www.fandangonow.com/, at least one server operating on behalf of Fandango transmits an MPD of “Bumblebee” of the form “dash.mpd” to the client. For further example, after “The Karate Kid” is selected from the videos available at https://www.fandangonow.com/ by a client on a personal computer, at least one server operating on behalf of Fandango receives, from the client, a request for content corresponding to at least one of the five video representations in the specific “dash.mpd” MPD for “The Karate Kid” for bandwidths of 251K, 851K, 1201K, 1601K, and 2001K. Thus, the movie is rendered to the user on behalf of Fandango.com

Additionally, the plaintiffs claimed that the Accused Instrumentalities include audio and video adaptation sets, as well as different segments for the movies to send to the client, each of the aforementioned sets and segments have various attributes, such as “id, bandwidth, width, height, sar, ( ) scanType, ” and duration, among others as described in the patent, which the defendant purportedly infringed.

Helios is seeking the maximum available reasonable royalty damages to compensate for Fandango’s allegedly infringing activities, as well as costs and fees, among other relief.

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