Roku Infringes Video-Coding Patents Originally Owned by Philips, Alleges Lawsuit

The Roku Channel infringes three patents on internet search methods and digital compression schemes, including two originally assigned to Philips in the Netherlands in 2003 and 2005, alleged patent owner Uniloc in a complaint (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in Austin. The “inventive solution” of one of the Philips patents (No. 6,519,005, granted February 2003) on motion-coding an uncompressed digital video data stream made possible digital-video encoding that was “simpler, faster, and less expensive” than previously available technology, said the complaint. The other Philips patent (No. 6,895,118, granted May 2005) on methods of coding digital images based on “error concealment” was a forerunner to MPEG-4 and other super-efficient compression schemes that reduced the amount of data required to send a video stream by “intentionally dropping certain image blocks, and then concealing the lost blocks through the use of spatial interpolation,” it said. The Roku Channel uses methods “for coding a digital image comprising macroblocks in a binary data stream,” in violation of the patent, it said. Philips didn’t comment Friday on how Uniloc came to own the patents. A Roku spokesperson declined comment Friday.