Fandango Sued for Infringement of Media Streaming Patents


On Friday in the Central District of California, Helios Streaming, LLC and IdeaHub, Inc. filed a complaint against Fandango Media, LLC, an online movie ticket sale and media streaming platform, for patent infringement, alleging that the defendant infringed its media streaming-related patents.

The plaintiffs noted that IdeaHub is the assignee and owner of the patents-in-suit and Helios holds the exclusive license and rights to assert them. The patents-in-suit 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), all of which “claim( ) technologies for providing adaptive HTTP streaming services using metadata of media content.”

The plaintiffs stated that these technologies are “fundamental to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (‘DASH’), a media-streaming model for delivering media content.” DASH technology has been standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in the ISO/IEC 23009 standard. The patents allegedly “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.”

According to the complaint, Fandango infringed at least claims 8 and 11 of the ’830 patent, entitled “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 averred that Fandango’s Accused Instrumentalities perform the patented method of “providing media content performed by a server or multiple servers.” The plaintiffs proffered that if The Lego Movie is selected from Fandango’s website, for example, the “client receives from at least one server operating on behalf of Fandango, an MPD of the for ‘dash.mpd.’” Accordingly, at least one Accused Instrumentalities server receives a client’s request for a media content segment, which it transmits to the client. Thus, as per the example, upon request the server will transmit a segment of The Lego Movie on behalf of Fandango to the client.

Additionally, the plaintiffs claimed that the Accused Instrumentalities includes 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. As a result, the plaintiffs contend that Fandango infringed the ’830 patent and the remaining patents-in-suit.

The plaintiffs have sought declaratory judgment in its favor, an award for damages, costs, and fees; and other relief. The plaintiffs are represented by Devlin Law Firm PLLC.