The Walt Disney Company has agreed to license a patent from Acacia Technologies, an intellectual property company that claims to own the rights to "Digital Media Transmission" over the Internet - in other words streaming video.
Acacia has brought legal actions starting a year ago to begin collecting on its "submarine patent," which lay dormant for years and suddenly looks like a way to make money from an accepted way of delivering media.
Acacia has signed some 117 licensing agreements, but until last quarter they were mostly with small "adult" Web sites; Disney and Liberty Media's Lodgenet are its biggest scalps so far. It signed 72 deal last quarter among them ones Virgin Radio and CinemaNow, the Internet movie company.
The payments can't be very large, given that Acacia's revenue was only half a million dollars last quarter, but it begs the question what Disney is planning to do with the license. There's some idea that it simply relates to the streaming it does from its existing Web sites, and that it is not a sudden thrust into video-on-demand over an IP network.
The main thrusts of Disney's digital distribution effort have gone into "data casting," and its Moviebeam idea that it can sell a Disney set-top into residences that will gradually capture 100 Disney films over the spare capacity in the TV signal. As such this doesn't require the license at all.
So it is likely that the license is just about keeping Disney out of court for its existing video streaming activity at Disney, ESPN and ABC News Web sites.
This story comes from Rethink Research's Faultline newsletter, which reports, analyzes and predicts the consequences of a broadband- connected world. Details can be found at http://www.rethinkresearch.biz
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