Seems like a patent troll…
All three of the Touchstream patents in question are titled “Play control of content on a display device” and detail “a system for presenting and controlling content on a display device” that uses “a network, a server system coupled to the network and comprising one or more servers, a display device coupled to the network and having a display, and a personal computing device operable to transmit a first message according to a specified format over the network to the server system.”
Play control of content on a device. So…remotes violate this patent? Cmon.
Without reading the whole patent it did sound a bit too generic and obvious for the patent to be valid, but I’m not a patent lawyer. The comments from Touchstream were pretty great though.
I wouldn’t blame a small company for not being able to bring a competing product to market against Google, but it seems like a long time to wait to sue someone making money off a stolen patent.
This sounds like an old X11 thin client would infringe this patent, which came out in the 80’s. Chromecast and cloud gaming derive from that, being more of a refinement than an invention.
Looks like it’s specifically the “casting” portion of Chromecast. The patent details having one device, in the example an iphone, request to play a video on a larger device, where it’ll either play it from cache or pull it from the internet to display it. Seems a bit generic to actually patent something like that, but as usual parents serve to do nothing other than stifle innovation.
