LeEco Filed More Than 800 Chinese Patents in Past 3 Years, Our Search Finds

Chinese tech and internet giant LeEco, which recently announced ambitions to break into the U.S. in a big way and plans Wednesday to reveal a “truly disruptive” content partnership (see 1610190058), filed more than 800 patents in China over the past three years, our searches found. The filings didn't show up through the records of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office but rather in the indexes of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. Many of the patent abstracts that were translated into English are brief and none too clear in meaning, so the likely novelty of the ideas described is hard to determine. But a clear pattern of corporate interest emerges from the search. Three years ago, LeEco was concentrating on developing smart TVs but more recently moved on to downloading, networking, multimedia streaming, peer-to-peer file transfer, advertising insertion and video coding, our search found. Among the patents on TV technology we noted was one on remotely waking a smart TV set from sleep mode and another on controlling a TV with a single hand gesture so “great convenience is brought to the user in the using process."