FreeWheel Media, Inc.

I'll research FreeWheel Media, Inc. to verify its profile.

Let me verify the litigation context and the AlmondNet dispute.

FreeWheel Media, Inc. (FreeWheel)

Company overview. FreeWheel Media, Inc., trading as FreeWheel, is a video and connected-TV (CTV) advertising-technology company headquartered at 1407 Broadway, New York, with offices in Chicago, London, Paris, Beijing and elsewhere. It was founded in 2007 by former DoubleClick executives and was acquired by Comcast in March 2014; it now operates inside Comcast Advertising as a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA). Comcast does not break out FreeWheel's financials, and third-party estimates vary too widely to be reliable; headcount estimates generally cluster around 1,400–1,700 employees.

Products / operations. FreeWheel is an operating company, not a shell licensor. Its offerings include a Publisher Suite (ad server and supply-side platform for premium video sellers), the Buyer Cloud demand-side platform built on Beeswax (acquired 2021), the FreeWheel Streaming Hub marketplace, Strata (agency media-buying workflow software), and the FreeWheel Identity Network/Identity Graph for cross-screen audience targeting. It also publishes the Video Marketplace Report. Earlier acquisitions include StickyADS.tv (2016) and the integration of Visible World/AudienceXpress.

Patent-litigation posture. FreeWheel is primarily a defendant-side operating company: of the three tracked matters, two are district court suits against it and one is a PTAB petition it filed. Both district court suits were brought by AlmondNet, Inc. and Intent IQ, LLC — licensing-oriented ad-targeting patent owners that have also sued Amazon, Microsoft/Xandr, LinkedIn and Oracle — in the District of Delaware (Judge Maryellen Noreika), not in plaintiff-favorable venues such as the Eastern or Western District of Texas.

Notable cases. AlmondNet v. FreeWheel Media (1:23-cv-00220, filed 2023-03-01) asserted patents covering behavioral profile-based ad targeting and TV/online cross-device matching; FreeWheel responded with more than a dozen IPR petitions at the PTAB (including IPR2024-00419/00420 on the '015 patent and four petitions on the '260 patent; real parties in interest include Comcast entities), and public docket reporting indicates the case ended in a stipulated dismissal with prejudice with no merits ruling. A second suit (1:24-cv-01259, filed 2024-11-15) asserts four patents ('962, '164, '069, '198) against FreeWheel and Beeswax.io Corp., targeting the Beeswax-derived DSP's handling of set-top-box/OTT tracking events and probabilistic device matching.