The recently litigious Kudelski Group has this week added a suit against NFL Enterprises for 7 patents which it claims to own, relating to streaming video.
The case was brought in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the most experienced patent court in the country. It seems pretty much a boilerplate suit which Kudelski group subsidiary OpenTV has brought against Netflix, Apple, Yahoo, and by association Verizon, in the past.
It has targeted NFL Network/NFL Redzone, NFL Now, NFL Game Pass, NFL Mobile, the NFL App, and NFL Fantasy Football and all the patents are to do with interactivity, pushing data to a TV screen – basic stuff that every OTT service has to do – and these suits go back to 2012, when the first one was brought.
If they are the same 7 patents, they will relate to placing internet information on a TV screen, online media delivery, using presentation syntax to offer interactivity, the creation of user profiles and systems of TV playout. Kudelski has been suing on behalf of its subsidiary, Open TV, a US business which it acquired, with a strong middleware platform, particularly strong in Europe on set tops.
The Netflix case fell apart, but other cases have resulted in some form of royalty payment. Netflix and Kudelski’s Nagra became best of friends and instead of pursuing the case, worked jointly on pre-integrating Nagra’s anyCast DRM and Open TV platform with Netflix. Apple agreed a licensing deal with Open TV last August, while the suit with Verizon and subsidiaries has yet to be settled.
Meanwhile Kudelski Group has made another strong move into cyber security, buying Dallas-based M&S Technologies, a specialist provider of cyber and network security systems. It bought another similar specialist in 2016, Milestone Systems – based in Minneapolis.
André Kudelski, Kudelski Group Chairman and CEO, said: “Providing global cybersecurity solutions is a strategic part of the Group’s future growth. To achieve our goals, we have a multi-dimensional approach, including technological excellence and geographic expansion. The addition of M&S broadens our technical capabilities and provides us a strong foothold in the South Central region of the U.S.”