Patent Lawsuit Filed Against WWE Over WWE Network Technology

WWE has been served with a lawsuit regarding the company’s infrastructure for the WWE Network. PWInsider reports that SITO Mobile R&D IP, LLC and SITO Mobile, Ltd. filed a lawsuit against the cmpany on September 14th alleging that WWE violated their existing patents related to a “system and method for routing media.”

The lawsuit argued that WWE “owns, controls, operates and uses a system for streaming media” — AKA the WWE Network — using a technology that they own the patent for without their approval, authorization, and license. The lawsuit notes:

“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.”

SITO alleges that they have suffered harm by the patent infringement and will “continue to suffer irreparable harm and damages as a result of this infringement.” They’re asking for a jury trial. WWE has yet to respond to the suit.