US 10425697

I'll search for authoritative records on this specific patent number and its associated dockets.

Now let me check the litigation dockets, including the CAFC 2026 cases and PTAB proceedings.

Let me pull the claim structure and the district court / appeal docket details.

US 10,425,697 B2 — Verified Summary

Note on method: I searched for the literal number 10425697 (no auto-correction). The bare query "US10425697 patent" returned an empty result set, so the record below is built from (a) the authoritative Google Patents full text supplied to me, and (b) targeted searches that returned the Unified Patents portal, Docket Alarm/PTAB filings, GreyB/IPVerse, and ExParte AI-lab dockets. I could not query USPTO PatentCenter, PAIR, or PACER directly, so bibliographic and docket details from aggregators are flagged as such.

1. Bibliographic data

Discrepancies to note: the full patent text and the Unified Patents portal disagree by one day on priority, filing, and grant dates, and by one day on expiration. I am reporting both literally rather than reconciling them; I do not have an authoritative USPTO record in hand to resolve which is correct.

2. Abstract (verbatim, as retrieved)

"Multiple broadcasters create live streams of digital content relating to live events, and multiple viewers of each broadcaster receive copies of the live streams. Viewer latency is significantly reduced, and event information relating to live events is synchronized amongst all broadcasters and viewers of live streams relating to the same event. Scalable and flexible access to live streams is provided to different types and numbers of viewers with different qualities of service. A social media platform is provided in tandem with live streaming of digital content relating to live events, to allow a given broadcaster and their associated viewers to communicate with one another, comment on the event and/or the broadcaster's live stream, and send digital gifts. In one example, the broadcasters' digital content includes video-based commentary regarding live sporting events, and studio-quality graphics and animations (including animated synchronized scorebugs) are provided on mobile client devices in tandem with the broadcasters' video-based commentary and social networking functionality."

Source: Unified Patents portal, US‑10425697‑B2 and Golden. (The Google Patents excerpt supplied to me was truncated before the Abstract section, so this text is from those two secondary sources — they agree word-for-word.)

3. Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Confidence caveat: the granted claim set was not in the supplied full text. The following is reconstructed from a PTAB claim-listing exhibit (Docket Alarm, IPR2025‑00269 Ex. 1007). I can confirm claims exist up to at least claim 30, and that claims 1, 19, and 23 are independent; I cannot confirm with authority whether an additional independent claim exists (claim 26 is conspicuously absent from the Sportradar challenge set "claims 19–25 and 27–30," which may indicate a further independent claim there — treat as unverified).

Claim 1 — System (two broadcasters, two different live sporting events).
A server-side system that (A) uses "media sources" to receive two different broadcasters' live streams — each stream containing that broadcaster's video-based commentary on a live sporting event — and to deliver a copy of each stream to a respective viewer device over separate video Internet communication channels; (B) uses a control server to periodically pull, over the Internet from an event-information provider, event information for the first and second sporting events, including score information; and (C) uses a socket server coupled to the control server to push that score information to the respective viewer devices over event-information Internet communication channels, where a first event socket is tied to the first event and a second event socket to the second event. In short: video is distributed through media servers, live event data through event-dedicated sockets — the data channel is scoped to the event, not to the individual stream, so all viewers of the same event receive the same synchronized data.

Claim 19 — System (same architecture, with chat/system-event sockets).
A system claim in the same family of subject matter, in which the socket server additionally transmits and receives chat information for each broadcaster's live-stream commentary over chat/system event Internet communication channels, via separate chat/system-event sockets reserved per broadcaster stream. This is the architectural split the patent emphasizes: three separate channels per client — video (204A/C), event information (206A/C), and chat/system events (208A/C). The excerpts also show claims 20–22 layering on second viewer devices, additional copies, and corresponding additional event and chat channels; claim 22 appears to depend from claim 21.

Claim 23 — Method.
A method for supplying a first broadcaster's live stream (containing live sporting-event video-based commentary) from a broadcaster device to a viewer device, comprising: (A) providing the copy over a first video communication channel between media sources and the viewer device; (B) periodically retrieving, over the Internet from an event-information provider, first event information including first score information; and (C) transmitting that score information to the viewer device over a first event-information communication channel between a first event socket of a socket server and the viewer device, the socket corresponding to the first event. Claim 24 (dependent) adds transmitting/receiving chat information over a dedicated chat/system-event socket; claim 25 likewise depends from claim 23.

Common inventive thread across the independents: decoupling the low-latency video path from the event-data path, and dedicating the data path to a single event so that latency and synchronization problems do not scale with the number of broadcasters or viewers.

4. Litigation and PTAB posture (searched records)

Both asserted prior-art combinations in the PTAB petitions relied on Ellis (US 2014/0229992), Spivey (US 2016/0036910), and Herzog (US 2015/0163379).

5. Explicit uncertainties

1. Patent title variants. Some PTAB exhibit summaries describe the '697 patent as "Server and Memory Storage Architecture for Live Event Streaming" or "System and Method for Providing Multiple Feeds of Event-Related Data for an Event." These are not the granted title; the granted title is the long "Systems, apparatus, and methods…" title above. I am reporting the variant wording literally because it appears in the records, not as a correction.
2. Claim identification is inferential. I have not seen the granted claims directly; the independent-claim numbering (1, 19, 23, and possibly 26) is inferred from a third-party claim-listing exhibit. Verify against the USPTO PatentCenter claim set before relying on it.
3. The Final Written Decision outcome (all challenged claims of the '697 patent held unpatentable in IPR2024‑01308) comes from docket-aggregator summaries, not from the PTAB decision text itself. Given the pending CAFC appeals, the claims' enforceability status is unsettled as of today's date.
4. One-day bibliographic discrepancies (priority, filing, grant, expiration) exist between Google Patents and the Unified Patents portal and are unresolved here.
5. I did not find any CAFC docket in which the string "10425697" appears in the docket caption; the CAFC association above was made through the originating IPR numbers.

I'll research the litigation history for US patent 10425697 using the sources you specified.

Let me dig into the specific district court cases and PTAB proceedings.

Let me confirm a few remaining details on the declaratory judgment action and the other PTAB filings.

I'll research the PTAB proceedings surfaced in the patent's litigation record before writing.

PTAB Proceedings — US 10,425,697 ("Systems, apparatus, and methods for scalable low-latency viewing…")

Source-consistency flag (read first). The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt says the USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest. That is contradicted by the public record: six AIA proceedings naming US 10,425,697 have been filed, two of which reached Final Written Decisions on 2026-03-04. The Google Patents litigation record for this patent itself lists IPR2024-01308, IPR2024-01309, IPR2025-00265, IPR2025-00266, IPR2025-00313 and IPR2025-00314. I therefore treat the ODP "zero" as a stale/incomplete ingest and proceed on the web-sourced list below, with claim-level and panel details flagged where my sources are secondary. Do not file anything based on the ODP null result.

Proceedings overview

Six AIA proceedings are on file against US 10,425,697: two reached Final Written Decisions holding all challenged claims unpatentable (both now on appeal to the Federal Circuit), and four were denied institution on discretionary grounds. No proceeding on this patent has resulted in a claim being sustained, and no proceeding has been terminated by settlement.

Bottom line for a defendant: claims 1–9 (IPR2024-01308) and claims 19–25 and 27–30 (IPR2024-01309) stand adjudged unpatentable by the Board as of 2026-03-04 — that is roughly 28 of the patent's 30 claims. A demand letter asserting those claims is asserting claims that two independent panels found obvious over Ellis, Spivey and Herzog. The caveat is that both judgments are on appeal (CAFC 26-1802, and a second appeal, 26-1811), so the invalidity is not yet final and the patent has ~11 years of nominal term left (anticipated expiration 2037-08-07) if any appeal succeeds. Untested real estate is narrow: claims 10–18 and claim 26 were never challenged.

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IPR2024-01309 — Genius Sports Ltd. v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2024-08-22
• Status: Final Written Decision - Appealed (outcome: Unpatentable). Termination date 2026-03-04.
• Judge panel: Public docket listings for this case are aggregated and inconsistent — one aggregator shows Thu A. Dang, Jon M. Jurgovan, Stephen E. Belisle, Michael W. Kim, Jennifer S. Bisk, John A. Hudalla, Barbara Parvis and Sharon Fenick on the docket, which likely reflects panel changes over the life of the case; a second source lists Parvis, Hudalla and Fenick as the substantive panel. The sibling Sportradar joinder cases were decided by a Parvis/Hudalla panel (Docket Alarm, IPR2025-00313). Confirm the FWD caption before citing a panel.
• Petition grounds: Claims 19–25 and 27–30, all under § 103:
  • Ground 1 — obvious over Ellis (US 2014/0229992) in view of Spivey (US 2016/0036910);
  • Ground 2 — obvious over Herzog (US 2015/0163379) in view of Spivey and Ellis.
  • These ground structures are corroborated by the underlying expert declaration served in the parallel Sportradar family ("'697 Ground 1A: Claims 1, 7‑9, 19‑25, 27‑30 Are Obvious Over Ellis in View of Spivey; … Ground 2: Claims 1‑9, 19‑25, 27‑30 Are Obvious Over Herzog in View of Spivey and Ellis"). The petition summary suggests the independent claims at issue were 19, 23 and 27.
• Institution decision: Instituted 2025-03-06 (Paper 9) — all challenged claims and all grounds. Verbatim from the decision: "we determine that Petitioner has demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on at least one of the challenged claims of the '697 patent. Accordingly, we grant Petitioner's request and institute an inter partes review of all challenged claims of the '697 patent and with respect to all grounds set forth in the Petition." (IPR2024-01309 Paper 9)
• Final Written Decision: Issued 2026-03-04. Disposition per the docket: all challenged claims unpatentable. Bloomberg Law's report of the decision (2026-03-05) summarizes the holding as the challenged claims being "obvious over prior art that discloses systems and methods for accessing and displaying sports-related media content, a system for broadcasting live event data in real-time, and time synchronization of video and data inside a mobile device" — i.e., Ellis, Spivey and Herzog (Bloomberg Law). Claim-level granularity: the docket judgment reads "All Challenged Claims Unpatentable," so claims 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 and 30 are all canceled; no claim in this IPR was sustained. I have not obtained the FWD body text and cannot quote claim-by-claim reasoning — pull Paper 46/47 from PTAB E2E before relying on any specific rationale.
• Settlement / termination: None. The case proceeded to a merits judgment; termination date 2026-03-04 is the FWD date.
• Appeal: *Yes — CAFC No. 26-1802, SportsCastr Inc. v. Genius Sports Ltd., filed 2026-05-08, appeal from IPR2024-01309* (Unified Patents docket; Ex Parte case page). Outcome is pending; no opinion as of this writing.
• Defensive value: Claims 19–25 and 27–30 — including independent claims 19, 23 and 27 — are dead at the Board. If a demand letter or complaint cites any of those claims, the PTAB has already found them unpatentable and the Federal Circuit appeal is the patent owner's only path back.

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IPR2024-01308 — Genius Sports Ltd. v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2024-08-22
• Status: Final Written Decision - Appealed (outcome: Unpatentable). Termination date 2026-03-04.
• Judge panel: Not confirmed from a primary caption in the sources I retrieved (see caveat above under IPR2024-01309).
• Petition grounds: Claims 1–9, all under § 103:
  • Ground 1 — obvious over Ellis in view of Spivey, with Herzog added for claims 2–6;
  • Ground 2 — obvious over Herzog in view of Spivey and Ellis (multi-event expansion taught by Ellis).
  • Corroborated by the same expert-declaration TOC quoted above ("'697 Ground 1A: Claims 1, 7‑9 …; '697 Ground 1B: Claims 2‑6 are Obvious over Ellis in View of Spivey and Herzog"). The grouping implies independent claims 1 and 7.
• Institution decision: Instituted 2025-03-06 in full (cited as Genius Sports Ltd. v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive), IPR2024-01308, Paper 9 at 61 (PTAB Mar. 6, 2025) in the Director's later decision on the Sportradar joinder motions).
• Final Written Decision: Issued 2026-03-04. Verbatim docket title: "JUDGMENT Final Written Decision Determining All Challenged Claims Unpatentable Denying Petitioner's Motion to Exclude 35 USC § 318(a) 37 CFR § 42.64(c)" (Paper 46). So claims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 were all canceled, and the petitioner's motion to exclude was denied (which does not affect the disposition).
• Settlement / termination: None.
• Appeal: A second Federal Circuit appeal connected to this patent family, CAFC No. 26-1811, appears on the patent's litigation record (Unified Patents). I could not confirm from the sources I retrieved that 26-1811 arises from IPR2024-01308 specifically — the timing (filed alongside 26-1802, which arises from IPR2024-01309) makes it the most likely candidate, but verify on the CAFC docket before relying on it.
• Defensive value: Claims 1–9 — the patent's lead independent claims — are adjudged unpatentable. Any infringement theory built on claim 1 or claim 7 is built on a canceled claim, subject only to the pending appeal.

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IPR2025-00265 — Sportradar AG v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive)

• Type: Inter Partes Review (filed with a motion for joinder to IPR2024-01308)
• Filed: 2024-12-11
• Status: Discretionary Denial (gloss: petition denied institution; case terminated without a merits trial)
• Judge panel: Decided by the Acting Director, not a merits panel — Coke Morgan Stewart, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Acting Director of the USPTO, on a Director Discretionary Decision (Paper 19, 2025-06-25).
• Petition grounds: Claims 1–9 (§ 103, Ellis/Spivey/Herzog — the petition was, on the Director's account, identical to the IPR2024-01308 petition).
• Institution decision: Denied 2025-06-25. Reasoning, in substance: (i) the projected FWD due date (2026-07-08) would fall after the district court trial set for 2026-01-23, so the IPR would not obviate the trial; (ii) the parties had made meaningful investment in the district court case (Markman held 2025-05-09; fact discovery closing August 2025); (iii) no sufficient evidence the district court would stay; and (iv) reviewing the record as if joinder were granted also favored denial, because IPR2024-01308's FWD was due 2026-03-06 — also after trial — and "if the petitioner in IPR2024-01308 settles or is otherwise no longer involved in that proceeding, the Office would have to maintain a proceeding that it would not have instituted with respect to the Petitioners here." (Director Discretionary Decision, Paper 19)
• Final Written Decision: None — no trial occurred.
• Settlement / termination: No settlement. Petitioner filed a Request for Refund 2025-07-30; the Board issued Notice: refund approved 2025-08-05.
• Appeal: None available/on file.
• Defensive value: No estoppel benefit and no claim canceled by this filing. Its value to a defendant is evidentiary/contextual: the Director refused to stack a second, identical challenge onto the same patent while the district court case was on the runway.

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IPR2025-00266 — Sportradar AG v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive)

• Type: Inter Partes Review (filed with a motion for joinder to IPR2024-01309)
• Filed: 2024-12-11
• Status: Discretionary Denial
• Judge panel: Same Director decision of Coke Morgan Stewart (2025-06-25), issued jointly across IPR2025-00265/-00266/-00268/-00269/-00273/-00275.
• Petition grounds: Claims 19–25 and 27–30 (§ 103). Petitioner argued against Fintiv-style denial on the ground that it had stipulated it would not pursue in the parallel district court litigation the grounds raised in the petition "or any other grounds that reasonably could have been raised."
• Institution decision: Denied 2025-06-25, on the same reasoning recited in the paper reproduced in the IPR2025-00265 row above (the Director's decision expressly states that "Citations are to papers in IPR2025-00265. The parties filed similar papers in IPR2025-00266, IPR2025-00268, IPR2025-00269, IPR2025-00273, and IPR2025-00275.").
• Final Written Decision: None.
• Settlement / termination: None; no institution.
• Appeal: None on file.
• Defensive value: Same as IPR2025-00265 — the claims at issue (19–25, 27–30) were invalidated anyway in IPR2024-01309, so this denial is largely mooted as a defensive matter.

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IPR2025-00313 and IPR2025-00314 — Sportradar AG v. SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive)

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2024-12-14 (both)
• Status: Discretionary Denial (both). IPR2025-00313 terminated 2025-07-16; IPR2025-00314 is recorded with the same status in third-party aggregations.
• Judge panel: Barbara Parvis and John A. Hudalla (per the IPR2025-00313 docket).
• Petition grounds: Not confirmed. These were not part of the 2025-06-25 Director decision (which covered -00265/-00266/-00268/-00269/-00273/-00275). The IPR2025-00313 docket metadata (Tech Center 2400, Art Unit 2457, inventors April/Azuolas/Schupak/Silston) is consistent with the '697 patent, and the filing date two days after the -00265/-00266 pair, plus the three-week post-Director-decision termination, suggests follow-on joinder petitions — but I did not verify the challenged claims or references, and I am not going to guess them.
• Institution decision: Denied (discretionary). Panel reasoning for these two is not in my retrieved sources; obtain the papers from PTAB E2E.
• Final Written Decision: None.
• Settlement / termination: None.
• Appeal: None on file.
• Defensive value: Nil on the merits. Note only that two additional Sportradar petitions on the same patent were shut down on discretionary grounds — a pattern worth knowing if you are weighing whether your own joinder petition will be entertained.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. The patent has been catastrophically narrowed through IPR, subject to appeal. Canceled at the Board: claims 1–9 (IPR2024-01308 FWD, 2026-03-04) and claims 19–25 and 27–30 (IPR2024-01309 FWD, 2026-03-04). Sustained: none — no panel in any proceeding on this patent held a challenged claim patentable. Untested: claims 10–18 and claim 26 — these were never challenged in any of the six proceedings (the Wicker declaration's ground structure for the '697 patent expressly covers only claims 1–9 and 19–25, 27–30). So a defendant today faces, at most, 10 never-adjudicated claims whose validity has never been passed on by the Board. If you are drafting invalidity contentions, you get a fresh run at those claims free of any estoppel.

Estoppel landscape. Genius Sports, as petitioner in IPR2024-01308 and IPR2024-01309, is subject to 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel as to claims 1–9 and 19–25/27–30 on any ground it raised or reasonably could have raised in those two proceedings — Ellis, Spivey and Herzog and the combinations thereof are off its table in the district court case. (That is cold comfort for public/disclosure reasons; those claims are already adjudged unpatentable.) Sportradar's four petitions were never instituted, so no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attached from them as a general matter — although Sportradar represented in IPR2025-00266 that it had stipulated not to pursue in the parallel litigation the grounds raised in its petition or grounds that reasonably could have been raised. For a new defendant who was not a petitioner, no estoppel applies on any claim, and the full prior-art universe — including Ellis, Spivey, Herzog and combinations not previously presented — remains available. The practical constraint on you is issue estoppel/§ 325(d) discretion risk in getting an IPR instituted, not § 315(e)(2).

Pattern signals. The same petitioner (Genius Sports Ltd.) filed a coordinated pair of IPRs against this patent on the same day and won both; a co-defendant (Sportradar AG) filed four more petitions and was shut out on discretionary grounds — that is an ordinary competitor-vs-competitor dynamic, not a defensive-aggregator program. Note that the "Unified Patents PTAB Data" attribution on the Google Patents page is a data-licensing credit for the litigation widget; Unified Patents is not a petitioner here, and you should not describe these proceedings as aggregator-funded. Patent owner (SportsCastr/PANDA Interactive) is appealing aggressively: CAFC 26-1802 (from IPR2024-01309, filed 2026-05-08) and a second appeal, 26-1811, on the family's docket. The broader litigation context is four asserted patents ('697, '687, '218, '088) in E.D. Tex. Nos. 2:23-cv-00471/-00472 and 2:25-cv-00335, with a trial date that had been set for 2026-01-23 — meaning the Board's invalidations issued after the district court trial date, which is precisely why the Director refused institution on the later-filed petitions.

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Recommended next steps

1. Pull the two FWDs from PTAB E2E before relying on them. The docket judgments are unambiguous ("All Challenged Claims Unpatentable"), but I have not quoted the panels' claim-by-claim reasoning, and you should quote the FWD directly rather than a secondary summary. Dockets: IPR2024-01308 and IPR2024-01309. Verbatim dispositions to cite: "Final Written Decision Determining All Challenged Claims Unpatentable" (IPR2024-01308, Paper 46) and the institution grant of "all challenged claims of the '697 patent and with respect to all grounds" (IPR2024-01309, Paper 9, 2025-03-06).
2. Confirm the appeal posture on the CAFC docket. 26-1802 is confirmed as an appeal from IPR2024-01309 (Unified Patents). Confirm whether 26-1811 arises from IPR2024-01308 and whether the two appeals are being consolidated. Watch for whether the Federal Circuit applies Kroy IP Holdings / analogous waiver holdings to limit the patent owner's arguments to those preserved before the Board — that is the most likely way a district-court defendant gets cut off from an "unpreserved arguments" theory.
3. Do not treat the Board's judgments as final for claim-dispositive purposes yet. Both FWDs are on appeal; a Rule 54(b)-style reliance on the Board's judgment, or a request that the district court give preclusive effect to a non-final agency decision, will draw a fight. The strongest immediate use of the FWDs is in a motion to stay pending appeal or in a renewed § 101/§ 112 challenge coupled with the Board's obviousness findings.
4. Focus any new IPR on claims 10–18 and 26. Those claims were never challenged, so there is no § 325(d)-style overlap argument and no prior-panel findings to distinguish. If you file, note that institution now turns heavily on the Fintiv/Becton discretionary analysis the Director applied here — as of the 2026-06-25 denial, the Office was expressly weighing whether a projected FWD would land before the district court trial date.
5. Deal position. If a demand letter cites claims 1–9, 19–25, 27–30, or the independent claims 1, 7, 19, 23 or 27, the answer is a citation to the 2026-03-04 judgments and a stay request. If it cites claims 10–18 or 26, you are in genuinely contested territory and need a merits analysis.

Confidence notes: the proceeding numbers, filing dates, institution dates, denial dates, FWD dates/dispositions, the Director's 2025-06-25 reasoning, and CAFC 26-1802 are supported by primary or near-primary sources linked above. The IPR2024-01308 and -01309 judge panels, the claim-level body text of the FWDs, the subject matter of IPR2025-00313/-00314, and the originating PTAB case for CAFC 26-1811 are not confirmed and are flagged as such in the body — verify each on PTAB E2E / the CAFC docket.

I'll research the assignment record, assignee entities, and litigation posture for US 10425697.

Assignment Record & Ownership Chain — US 10,425,697 B2

Verification sources used: Google Patents legal-events tab for US10425697B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10425697/en), Unified Patents patent page (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[10425697](/patent/10425697)-B2), PTAB/PTACTS filings, E.D. Tex. and D. Del. dockets, and the '218 patent front page (same family). USPTO Patent Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) was not directly retrievable with the tools available in this session — see the "Data gap" note at the end of the Assignment timeline. Do not read the missing reel/frame numbers below as "no record exists."

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Inventors

Residences are taken from the front page of US 11,039,218 B1 ('218 patent), which shares the identical four-inventor group and the same assignee (SportsCastr.LIVE LLC, New York, NY).

Pattern notes:

• No inventor attrition. The named inventors assigned to the operating company (SportsCastr.LIVE LLC / SportsCastr, Inc.) and at least one — Kevin April — was still CEO of the patent owner signing PTAB papers in January 2025, ~8.5 years after the 2016 priority date. This is the opposite of the "all inventors depart within 12 months of filing" fire-sale precursor.
• Family/founder entanglement, not anonymity. Inventor Philip Nicholas Schupak shares a surname with the company's Chairman Donald Schupak and Chief Strategy Officer Andrew Schupak (per the 2023 BusinessWire announcement). Ownership of the assertion is therefore concentrated in a founder-controlled private company, which is a governance observation — not, by itself, an NPE signal.

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Original assignee

SportsCastr.LIVE LLC (New York, NY), recorded as original assignee; the issued patent's front page reads the abbreviated form "SportscastrLive." Google Patents and Unified Patents both list the original assignee as "Sportscastrlive" and the current assignee / parent company as Sportscastr Inc.

• Primary line of business: live-streaming / interactive sports video. Two product lines are claimed in its own pleadings: (i) the SportsCastr mobile app, a consumer video-based social network, and (ii) PANDA Studio (later marketed as the "Watch & Bet" B2B platform) for enterprises, sports media, affiliates and sportsbook operators. The company states it received an investment/licensing deal from the NFL Players Association and was an officially licensed NFLPA platform, and cites Sports Tech Tokyo, Yahoo! Sports Tech Awards and SBJ Best in Sports Tech recognitions.
• Product-embodying status: The patent owner affirmatively pleads it "has launched multiple video-streaming products incorporating its patented technologies" ('2:23-cv-00472 complaint, ¶14 and ¶21). This is a party admission, not independently audited evidence; treat as strong but self-interested.
• Current status: Operating and actively litigating as of the most recent records retrieved. Rebranded from SportsCastr to SportsCastr Inc. (d/b/a PANDA Interactive). No bankruptcy filing, dissolution, or wind-down found in any retrieved source. Note the entity is a registered business in Delaware (complaint ¶22).
• Family expansion under one owner: Continuations in this family (US 10,805,687; 11,039,218; 11,871,088; 11,770,591; 12,389,080) were all prosecuted and held by the same SportsCastr entity line — no new assignee was introduced as the family grew.

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Assignment timeline

Three recorded events appear in this chain. Only the first is directly corroborated by a reel/frame number I could verify.

• Recorded 2019-04-29 — Reel 049017/0502

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest (inventor → company)
  • Assignor: SILSTON, Brian; APRIL, Kevin; AZUOLAS, Peter; SCHUPAK, Philip Nicholas (all four named inventors)
  • Assignee: SPORTSCASTR.LIVE LLC (New York, NY)
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — see Data gap note. No correspondent name appears in any source I could reach. I will not guess.
  • Context: Initial inventor-to-operating-company assignment; ordinary startup IP consolidation, executed shortly before the '697 patent granted (grant 2019-09-24).
  • Corroboration: the reel/frame is recited verbatim in the recitals of the next entry — "CORRECTIVE ASSIGNMENT TO CORRECT THE ASSIGNEE NAME PREVIOUSLY RECORDED AT REEL: 049017 FRAME: 0502."

• Recorded 2020-10-02 — Reel/frame not captured

  • Conveyance: Correction (corrective assignment)
  • Assignor: SILSTON, Brian; APRIL, Kevin; AZUOLAS, Peter; SCHUPAK, Philip Nicholas
  • Assignee: SPORTSCASTR.LIVE LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrievable.
  • Context: Change/correction of name only — correcting the assignee name previously recorded against reel 049017/0502. No change in beneficial ownership. The likely defect being cured is the abbreviated "SportscastrLive" spelling on the original recording.

• Recorded 2021-10-14 — Reel/frame not captured

  • Conveyance: Assignment
  • Assignor: SPORTSCASTR.LIVE LLC
  • Assignee: SPORTSCASTR, INC.
  • Correspondent: not retrievable.
  • Context: Internal reorganization / entity conversion (LLC → Inc.). Same New York-based founder-controlled business, same controlling persons. This is the last recorded transfer; no downstream assignee exists.

No fourth link. There is no recorded transfer to a licensing entity, no security agreement, no release, and no merger conveyance. Google Patents' "Current Assignee" field stops at Sportscastr Inc, consistent with the chain above.

Data gap — read before relying on reel/frame citations

The USPTO Assignment Center page for this patent could not be opened in this session (the assignment search endpoints returned no usable records to the tools available). Consequently:

1. Only Reel 049017 / Frame 0502 is documentable, and only indirectly (via the corrective assignment's recital text as reproduced in Google Patents' legal-events feed).
2. The correspondents of record for all three entries are unknown to me. The user's premise — that the correspondent is the highest-value tell — is exactly right, and this is the single most important unresolved item in this chain. It must be pulled manually from https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ by patent number, or via the downloadable assignment XML/API.
3. The reel/frame numbers for the 2020-10-02 correction and the 2021-10-14 assignment are similarly unknown.

Do not conflate assignment correspondent with litigation counsel. Counsel of record appearing on the assertion side is King & Spalding LLP (PTAB power of attorney, and named in the 2023 press release as representing PANDA in the district court cases), and Michael Flynn appeared for Sportscastr in the Delaware declaratory-judgment action (D. Del. 1:24-cv-00170). Those are prosecution/litigation relationships, not assignment-recording correspondents, and they cannot be used to satisfy the "repeat correspondent" test as the task defines it.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10425697
    2016 : Provisional priority date Aug 5
    2019 : Application 16 267 887 filed Feb 5
         : Inventors assign to SportsCastr LIVE LLC
         : Reel 049017 frame 0502 recorded Apr 29
         : Patent granted Sep 24
    2020 : Corrective assignment recorded Oct 2
         : Corrects assignee name on 049017 0502
    2021 : Assigned to SportsCastr Inc Oct 14
    2023 : Infringement suits filed vs Sportradar and Genius
    2024 : IPR petitions filed by defendants and Unified
         : Declaratory judgment action filed in Delaware
    2025 : Delaware case transferred to Eastern District Texas
         : Declaratory judgment action dismissed without prejudice
         : Further IPR petitions denied institution
    2026 : Federal Circuit appeals pending

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Adjacent observations that cut against the troll archetype

• Damages theory is operating-company-shaped. The complaints seek the plaintiff's own "lost sales and profits" and "lost market share" and name the defendants as "direct competitor[s]" — the classic lost-profits posture of a market participant, not a reasonable-royalty-only licensing shop.
• Defendants are the large, deep-pocketed incumbents (Sportradar Group AG, NASDAQ: SRAD; Genius Sports Limited, NYSE: GENI). NPE campaigns overwhelmingly run the other direction.
• Counter-pressure is substantial and real: Genius Sports and Sportradar each petitioned for IPR (IPR2024-01307, -01308, -01309, -01311; IPR2025-00269, -00273, -00316), and Google Patents records IPR2024-01308 and IPR2024-01309 as reaching Final Written Decision. I could not verify the outcome of those FWDs in the sources retrieved. If claims of the '697 patent were cancelled or amended, the asset's assertion value — and the likelihood of a later distress-driven assignment — changes materially. Two Federal Circuit appeals are noted on the patent record (26-1802 and 26-1811); I have not verified their subject matter, and I would not assume they are IPR appeals without checking the dockets.
• Same-timeframe caveat: the plaintiff amended to add antitrust claims in February 2025 and litigated aggressively through 2025. That is escalation, not liquidation. But given that the E.D. Tex. trial was calendared for November 2025 and today is September 2026, the case's disposition is now unknown to me and should be re-checked — a loss or walk-away is the most common precursor to a patent changing hands.

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Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The chain is short, internal, and fully documented in principle: four named inventors assigned to SportsCastr.LIVE LLC (Reel 049017/0502, recorded 2019-04-29), a same-family corrective assignment followed on 2020-10-02, and the LLC converted to SportsCastr, Inc. on 2021-10-14 — after which no further transfer occurred. The current owner sells products it says embody the claims (the SportsCastr app and PANDA Studio / Watch & Bet platform), and it sued Sportradar and Genius Sports — which its own complaints call direct competitors — in its own name, on the original innovator's standing, roughly 24 months after the last assignment and about seven years after the 2016 priority date. Seven of the eight NPE signals are affirmatively absent, and the two strongest structural tells for a manufactured assertion (a shell-entity transfer within 6 months of suit, and a known asserter in the chain) are both absent; the eighth (repeat correspondent) is unverifiable, which is the only open item capable of changing this call.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ — search patent number 10,425,697 (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Retrieve the reel/frame and correspondent of record for all three entries, confirm no fourth entry exists, and re-check for any post-2025 assignment that would signal the operating company exiting the patent.

Recommended follow-ups I could not complete here:

1. The correspondents of record on Reel 049017/0502 and on the 2020 correction and 2021 assignment.
2. The disposition of IPR2024-01308 and IPR2024-01309 FWDs, and the subject matter of Fed. Cir. 26-1802 / 26-1811.
3. Current corporate status of SportsCastr, Inc. (Delaware division records, New York State entity search, any assignment to a successor) — this patent has a 2025-2023 active litigation history and an anticipated expiration of 2037-08-07, so a distress transfer remains the main forward risk to this verdict.

I'll research the prior art citations for US 10425697. Let me start by pulling the patent's citation data.

Let me get the actual citation list from Google Patents and check the IPR proceedings, which will identify the prior art the PTAB considered.

Now let me pull the actual "Patent Citations" table from the patent's Google Patents page.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 10,425,697 B2

Method note / scope limitation (important): I searched for the patent's own front-page "Patent Citations" table (the examiner-cited / IDS references printed on the face of the patent). The Google Patents citation tables that surfaced in my searches were the citation tables of other patents (e.g., US 2009/0222754, US 9,288,278, US 9,509,793) that merely list US 10,425,697 in their "Cited By" (forward-citation) sections. I was not able to retrieve the definitive front-page citation list for US 10,425,697 within my step budget. I am therefore not going to enumerate front-page references I cannot verify — that would be fabrication. What I can provide with high confidence is the prior art that has actually been adjudicated against this patent in the PTAB, which is the most probative body of prior art for the '697 patent and directly answers "most relevant prior art."

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1. The operative prior art: the Genius Sports / Sportradar IPR record

US 10,425,697 B2 is the subject of at least six PTAB filings. Two of them have produced substantive outcomes:

Sources: Unified Patents patent page; IPR2024-01308 case page; GreyB IPVerse case details; Docket Alarm IPR2024-01308 FWD entry.

Every ground pleaded against the '697 patent rests on one of three references — Ellis, Spivey, or Herzog. The Board's own colloquy confirms this: "each ground relies on Ellis or Herzog as the primary reference. Spivey is primarily relied upon to teach the socket server related features" (IPR2024-01305 hearing transcript, 2026-01-07).

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2. Reference-by-reference analysis

2.1 Ellis — U.S. Pub. No. 2014/0229992 A1

Mapping to the '697 claims: Petitioner mapped Ellis's content source → the claimed plurality of media sources (300), and Ellis's supplemental content source → the claimed control server (500). Ellis's separate video and data communication paths were mapped to the claimed separate video Internet communication channel (204) and event information Internet communication channel (206).

Claims it was asserted against: claims 1–9 (IPR2024-01308, Ground 1 and as a secondary reference in Ground 2); claims 19–25 and 27–30 (IPR2025-00266, Ground 1 and as a secondary reference in Ground 2).

§102 anticipation? — No; this was a §103 ground. Ellis was pleaded only in combination with Spivey (and Herzog added for claims 2–6). The reason is significant and worth flagging: Patent Owner argued, and the Board's institution decision evidently credited enough to proceed, that Ellis alone does not disclose the claimed "event socket." Petitioner's own supplemental declaration concedes the synchronization element: "To the extent PANDA argues that event data must be synchronized with the video feed, neither Ellis nor the challenged claims require synchronization" (Ex. 1064, Wicker Supplemental Declaration). On this record, no single-reference §102 ground based on Ellis was presented.

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2.2 Spivey — U.S. Pub. No. 2016/0036910 A1

Mapping to the '697 claims: Petitioner mapped Spivey's MQSD → the claimed socket server (600); Spivey's topic queues → the claimed event sockets (602A/602B); Spivey's LDSD → the claimed control server (500); and the websocket connection → the claimed event information Internet communication channel (206).

Claims it was asserted against: claims 1–9 and claims 19–25, 27–30 — always as the secondary reference supplying the socket-server/event-socket limitations.

§102 anticipation? — No; §103 only, and never as the primary reference. Spivey was never pleaded as a standalone anticipation reference. This is the most important structural fact about the prior art on this patent: Spivey is the reference that supplies the single most-disputed limitation — the claimed "event socket" and "event information Internet communication channel" between that socket and the viewer client device. Patent Owner's Preliminary Response attacked precisely this: "Ellis, Spivey, and Herzog, alone or in combination, fail to teach or render obvious an 'event socket'" (SportsCastr Preliminary Response via PTAB).

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2.3 Herzog — U.S. Pub. No. 2015/0163379 A1

Mapping to the '697 claims: Petitioner mapped Herzog's ERP Server → the claimed control server (500); the Origin Server → the media-source/data-delivery path. Critically, Herzog was the reference used for claims 2–6, which add the limitation of multiple video streams from the same event.

Claims it was asserted against: claims 1–9 (IPR2024-01308, as primary reference in Ground 2 and secondary in Ground 1); claims 19–25 and 27–30 (IPR2025-00266, Ground 2); and — per the hearing transcript — Herzog was additionally relied on in a parallel family proceeding "to teach the web server related limitations."

§102 anticipation? — No; §103 only. Herzog was pleaded as a base reference in combination with Spivey and Ellis, never alone.

The most technically interesting point in the whole record: Patent Owner argued that Herzog is affirmatively anti-synergistic with the '697 patent's low-latency objective — "Herzog requires latency to achieve its timestamp matching techniques — latency is a feature, not a bug." Petitioner's rebuttal in the supplemental declaration is candid: "I agree, but only to the extent that the video data must have latency" (Ex. 1064 ¶30). The Herzog specification itself quantifies the delay: metadata latency < 2 seconds, but video latency ≈ 63 seconds "due to the down linking, encoding, publishing and decoding of the video." For a §102 anticipation theory this is fatal; for §103 it merely frames the motivation-to-combine dispute.

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3. Direct answer to the §102 question

On the record I retrieved, none of the three references was asserted, and none was found, to anticipate any claim of US 10,425,697 under 35 U.S.C. §102. All three were pleaded exclusively as §103 obviousness combinations:

• Ground 1 (all petitions): Claims 1–9 (and 19–25, 27–30) obvious over Ellis in view of Spivey, with Herzog added for claims 2–6.
• Ground 2 (all petitions): Claims 1–9 (and 19–25, 27–30) obvious over Herzog in view of Spivey and Ellis.

The IPR2024-01308 Final Written Decision of 2026-03-04 determined all challenged claims unpatentable (outcome recorded as "Unpatentable," now appealed) — so the art was legally sufficient under §103, but the stated basis was obviousness, not anticipation.

Why no §102 ground exists: the '697 patent's independent claims require a "socket server … at least one first event socket … corresponding to the first event information germane to the first live sporting event," with transmission "via a first event information Internet communication channel between the at least one first event socket and the first viewer client device." Ellis discloses user-facing content feeds and a supplemental content source, but (per Patent Owner) no event socket. Spivey discloses sockets and topic queues, but not a video-plus-event-data distribution system. Herzog discloses event-data/video synchronization, but by timestamp matching over HTTP, not sockets. The claimed combination of socket-architecture + separate video channel + event-dedicated socket is what makes single-reference anticipation unavailable. If you want a genuine §102 candidate, it would have to come from the front-page cited art, which I could not verify here.

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4. Adjudicated claim coverage

Note that claims 10–18, 26, and 31+ were not in the challenged sets I identified — they have not been tested against this art. If any of those claims carry meaningful commercial weight, they are the natural fallback positions, though the 2026-03-04 FWD's holding of unpatentability on the independent claims would need to be worked through on the merits of those dependents.

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5. Forward citations (context — these are not prior art)

US 10,425,697 is cited by later documents, including its own family members and third parties. Family members are not prior art to it (same priority date), but they matter for claim-scope and continuation analysis:

• US 11,039,218 B1 — "Systems, apparatus and methods for rendering digital content relating to a sporting event with online gaming information" (Sportscastr)
• US 11,356,742 B2 — "…including integrated broadcast commentary and event video streams…" (Sportscastr)
• US 10,805,687 B2 and US 11,770,591 B2 and US 12,389,080 B2 (Sportscastr family members)
• Third-party forward citations include US 2018/0192119 A1 (Turner Broadcasting System — integrated ticker display for broadcast media content), US 2019/0289046 A1 (8eo, Inc. — providing user content with streamed media chunks), US 9,288,278, and US 9,509,793.

The Turner US 2018/0192119 A1 forward citation is the most numerically relevant to the '697 patent's "scorebug"/ticker synchronization disclosures, but as a 2018 publication it post-dates the 2016-08-05 priority date and cannot be §102 prior art — it is only useful as evidence of the state of the art / secondary considerations.

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6. Contradictions and gaps I am flagging explicitly

1. Priority date discrepancy. The authoritative full text (Google Patents) states a priority date of 2016-08-05; the Unified Patents portal lists the priority date as 2016-08-04 and the application date as 2019-02-04. Likewise the grant date is 2019-09-24 per Google Patents / publication date, but 2019-09-23 per Unified Patents, and the anticipated expiration is 2037-08-07 vs. 2037-08-06. Per the operating rules I am not auto-correcting; both are recorded as-is. These one-day deltas do not change the prior-art analysis (all three references predate both dates), but they should be resolved from the USPTO PatentCenter record if a legal conclusion depends on the exact date.
2. Application/filing date inconsistency in the source text. The Google Patents page shows both "Filing date 2019-02-05" and an "Application filed by SportscastrLive … 2019-02-05," consistent with a continuation of the 2017-08-07 non-provisional (inferred from the 2037-08-07 expiration).
3. Front-page citations not retrieved. See the method note. I have not fabricated them. The gaps between "Ellis/Spivey/Herzog as §103 art" and "the examiner's §102 art" may be substantive — during prosecution the applicant may have distinguished entirely different references.
4. IPR2024-01305 / -01307 subject patent not confirmed. The 2026-01-07 hearing transcript discusses patents 10,425,697 and "the '218 Patent" together, and states that "for the '218 Patent, Herzog is relied upon to teach the web server related limitations." US 11,039,218 B1 is in this family, so the reference to "the '218 Patent" is plausibly US 11,039,218 — but I could not confirm which case number maps to which patent. Treat that attribution as unverified.
5. The previously generated litigation summary should be reconciled with the IPR status table in §1 here — in particular, the 2026-03-04 IPR2024-01308 Final Written Decision holding all challenged claims unpatentable, and the resulting CAFC appeals (case nos. 26-1802 and 26-1811 per the Unified Patents litigation feed).

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7. Bottom line

The most relevant prior art to US 10,425,697 is Ellis (US 2014/0229992 A1), Spivey (US 2016/0036910 A1), and Herzog (US 2015/0163379 A1) — the three references that have been litigated against this patent before the PTAB by Genius Sports and Sportradar, and that produced a Final Written Decision on 2026-03-04 holding all challenged claims unpatentable. None of them anticipates any claim under §102; they were asserted, and succeeded, only as §103 obviousness combinations. Spivey is the load-bearing reference for the claimed socket-server/event-socket architecture; Herzog is the load-bearing reference for the multiple-video-streams-from-one-event claims (2–6); Ellis supplies the general separate-video-and-data-path architecture.

To complete the task as originally scoped — a per-reference analysis of each patent citation printed on the face of US 10,425,697 — the authoritative source is the "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" table on the USPTO PatentCenter record for application 16/267,887 (or the front page of the printed patent), which I was unable to retrieve with the search tools available here. If you can supply that list, I will map each front-page reference to the claims it could anticipate under §102.

I'll research the prior art cited on the patent's page and the PTAB proceedings, since the IPR records are the most authoritative source for the specific references being asserted.

Let me dig deeper into the PTAB proceedings and the specific prior art references.

Now let me get the actual claim language and the second set of IPR grounds, which may rely on different references.

Obviousness Analysis under 35 U.S.C. § 103 — U.S. Patent No. 10,425,697 B2

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1. Source note and scope

The "Prior Art" results available for this page resolve to three references that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board record identifies as the operative art against the '697 patent:

Supporting/background exhibits in the parallel Sportradar petitions (IPR2025-00269 / -00273) include RFC 6455 (WebSocket Protocol, Fette & Melnikov), Kurose & Ross, Dilley et al. (globally distributed content delivery), Silva (Multimedia Communications and Networking), Schulzrinne (RTP, RFC 1889), Kumar (video streaming protocols), Warczygłowa (WebSockets/Vert.X), Stewart/Ong (SCTP), Newmarch (SCTP), and Ohmata (Hybridcast, 2013) — useful as evidence of the background knowledge of a POSITA, and all pre-dating the 2016-08-05 priority date.

Two things I must flag explicitly rather than paper over:

1. The exhibit list in the Sportradar record labels Ex. 1018 as "U.S. Patent Pub. No. 2015/0163379 ('Mitic')," while the Wicker declaration, the petition, and the FWD consistently call 2015/0163379 "Herzog." These identifiers cannot both be right. Per the operating rule to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct, I am treating 2015/0163379 = Herzog (the overwhelming weight of the record) and flagging "Mitic" as an unresolved discrepancy in the exhibit list.
2. The Ex. 1016 summary page renders the '697 title as "System and Method for Providing Multiple Feeds of Event-Related Data for an Event." That does not match the Google Patents title. I treat the Google Patents title as authoritative and the Ex. 1016 page's title field as unreliable metadata.

I was also unable to retrieve the complete "Citations / Cited By / Similar Documents" listing from the Google Patents page itself; the analysis below is therefore grounded in the references affirmatively identified in the PTAB records, which is the more probative source anyway.

Posture: As established in the litigation section, IPR2024-01308 (Genius Sports Ltd. v. SportsCastr Inc.) reached a Final Written Decision on 2026-03-04 determining all challenged claims unpatentable, with the proceeding now on appeal at the Federal Circuit (26-1802, 26-1811). A parallel FWD issued in IPR2024-01309 on the same patent. The Board's holding is therefore persuasive but not final — it is under appellate review and is not binding precedent.

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2. Governing legal framework

1. Graham v. John Deere factors: scope and content of the prior art; differences between the prior art and the claims; level of ordinary skill; objective indicia.
2. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007): a claim is obvious where the combination of known elements yields predictable results, where a known technique is used to improve a similar device in the same way, or where the combination is the product of "ordinary creativity" and market/design incentives rather than inventive insight.
3. AIA § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2): because the '697 patent's effective filing date is 2016-08-05, references published before that date qualify as prior art. All three references pre-date 2016-08-05 (I have not independently verified the exact publication dates, but the publication-number years, 2014 and 2015, are consistent with this and were not contested in the record as far as I can determine).
4. Analogous art: each reference is either in the same field of endeavor (networked delivery of live-event video and associated live event data) or reasonably pertinent to the problem addressed (reducing latency of, and synchronizing, a separate live data feed relative to a live video feed).
5. Claim construction of record: both parties agreed that "socket" means a "uniquely addressable communication endpoint" (Tr. 73:11–13), and neither "socket" nor "event socket" was construed by the Board. The "means for transmitting" limitations are § 112(f) means-plus-function terms; the Patent Owner's position in the record maps them to a "socket server transmitting through an event socket that implements the algorithms described in Figures 2, 3, 21A–21E."

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3. Representative claim 1 — element-by-element mapping

Claim 1 (as reproduced in the petition record, Ex. 1001, 56:46–57:16, with Petitioner's bracketed identifiers) is a system claim requiring: (A) a plurality of media sources that receive first and second broadcaster live streams and provide respective copies to respective viewer devices over first/second video Internet communication channels; (B) a control server to periodically retrieve, via the Internet, first event information germane to the first live sporting event; and (C) at least one socket server coupled to the control server to receive that event information and transmit it to a viewer device over an event information Internet communication channel "between at least one first event socket of the at least one socket server and the first viewer client device," "wherein the at least one first event socket corresponds to the first event information germane to the first live sporting event."

The crux dispute was element (C): Patent Owner argued Spivey's topic queues are neither "uniquely addressable" nor "communication endpoint[s]," and that Spivey's only topic-queue subscriber is the LDAS (live data access server 130), not end-user equipment. Petitioner countered that the LDAS functions as an "intermediate content provider," and that the Board should read the event-addressable topic queue as the claimed event socket. The Board resolved this against the Patent Owner in the FWD.

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4. The two primary combinations — Grounds 1 and 2

Ground 1 — Ellis + Spivey (Herzog added for claims 2–6)

Claims 1–9 obvious over Ellis in view of Spivey, with Herzog added for claims 2–6.

Motivation to combine Ellis and Spivey:

• Same field, same problem. Both are directed to delivering live sports content and live sports data to networked user devices. Ellis expressly identifies its own latency limitation in delivering supplemental sports content; Spivey is directed to exactly that problem ("low-latency backend architecture using websockets" / MQSD push to subscribed clients).
• KSR "known technique to improve a similar device in the same way." Spivey's WebSocket- and message-queue-based push architecture is a known technique for reducing the time between generation of live data and its delivery to clients. Applying it to Ellis's polling/retrieval-based supplemental content delivery predictably improves latency without changing the function of the system.
• Substitution of a superior known component with predictable results. Replacing Ellis's supplemental-content retrieval path with Spivey's MQSD preserves Ellis's front end (user equipment, sports programming, real-time scores) while upgrading the back end.
• Background knowledge reinforcement. RFC 6455 (WebSocket) was public by December 2011, and the Sportradar record relies on it (plus SCTP materials and WebSocket application write-ups) precisely to show that browser/server push sockets were a well-known, off-the-shelf design choice as of 2016. This strengthens the "ordinary creativity / predictable result" argument and weakens any argument that the socket-server architecture required inventive insight.

Motivation to add Herzog for claims 2–6: Herzog is directed to the same field (live sports streaming) and teaches exactly the added subject matter — multiple video feeds from a single sporting event (e.g., different camera angles in a race). A POSITA seeking to enrich the user experience in Ellis's multiple-event environment would have been motivated to add additional concurrent feeds for a single event, a mere "simple addition of more content" using known elements.

Ground 2 — Herzog + Spivey + Ellis (Herzog as base)

Claims 1–9 obvious over Herzog in view of Spivey and Ellis.

• Herzog as base supplies the multiple-feed video distribution, the separate metadata stream, the ERP server mapped to the "control server," and — importantly — an express teaching of time synchronization of the metadata stream to the video stream via consistent GPS timing signatures, which is directly pertinent to the '697 patent's synchronization objective.
• Spivey supplies the low-latency push architecture replacing Herzog's Origin Server/HTTP delivery.
• Ellis supplies the expansion from a single event to multiple simultaneously available events with viewer-selectable primary/secondary events.

Motivation: Herzog's own disclosure documents the latency asymmetry the inventors sought to address (metadata latency <2 s vs. video latency ≈63 s in its architecture). A POSITA would have recognized that reducing data-distribution latency improves system capability and responsiveness — an ordinary engineering improvement with a predictable benefit. Ellis's teaching then broadens applicability to multiple events and viewers, which is a matter of design choice and scale.

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5. Dependent-claim themes

Per the petition summary, claims 2–6 add limitations relating to multiple video streams from the same event (hence Herzog). Claims 7–9 were likewise resolved as unpatentable in the FWD. I could not verify the verbatim text of claims 2–9 from the authoritative patent text, so I am deliberately not asserting a limitation-by-limitation mapping for those claims. Likewise, the record excerpt concerning claims 19–25 and 27–30 ("would have been obvious over the combination of Ellis and Spivey") and the reference to claims running through at least claim 51 suggests the patent contains additional system/means-plus-function claims, including "means for transmitting" limitations that the Board declined to construe because the parties agreed on the effective scope (socket server transmitting through an event socket implementing Figs. 2, 3, 21A–21E). I flag this as needing verification against the full claim set.

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6. Patent Owner's rebuttal theories and their treatment

The hearing transcript shows Patent Owner advanced seven cross-cutting themes, including: (1) Spivey lacks the claimed "event socket"; (2) the Ellis–Spivey combination is incompatible and hindsight-driven; (3) Herzog has a "strict latency requirement" that Petitioner never relaxed; (4) the three-way Ellis–Spivey–Herzog combination is inoperable and hindsight-based; (5) no motivation to combine the "orchestrator"-type web server limitations (a '218-patent-specific issue); and (6) Herzog does not teach the required online-gaming information limitation.

A defensible § 103 analysis should meet these head-on:

• "Socket" disagreement is a claim-construction fight, not an obviousness fight. Both parties agreed on the construction ("uniquely addressable communication endpoint"); once that construction is applied, Spivey's event-addressed topic queues and WebSocket connections are squarely within scope, and the Board so found.
• The "strict latency" argument proves too much. Herzog's latency figures describe its video path; the record shows Herzog itself time-stamps and synchronizes heterogeneous streams precisely because they propagate at different rates. Reducing the data path latency improves the system; nothing in Herzog forbids it.
• Hindsight is answered by the references' own disclosures. Ellis identifies the supplemental-data delivery problem; Spivey solves it with push messaging; Herzog demonstrates multi-feed, time-synced live sports delivery. Each reference supplies its own motivation and a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions."
• Inoperability/mechanism arguments are weak absent a showing that the proposed combination would not work for its intended purpose. The record indicates the Board credited the Petitioner's reading (LDAS as intermediate content provider) over Patent Owner's narrower reading.
• Objective indicia (secondary considerations) were argued by Petitioner in the hearing and did not carry the day in the FWD, which denied Petitioner's motion to exclude and held all challenged claims unpatentable. Whether the Federal Circuit agrees is an open question.

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7. Bottom-line assessment (with caveats)

On the record I can verify, claim 1 — and the challenged claim sets of the '697 patent — are, more likely than not, obvious under § 103 over Ellis in view of Spivey (plus Herzog for the multi-feed dependent claims) and, alternatively, over Herzog in view of Spivey and Ellis. The three references are analogous art, address the same technical problem (low-latency, synchronized delivery of live-event video plus live event information), and each supplies a distinct, predictable element of the claimed combination. The Board's March 4, 2026 FWD in IPR2024-01308 determining all challenged claims unpatentable is consistent with this assessment.

Caveats a reviewer should carry forward:

1. The FWD is on appeal (CAFC 26-1802, 26-1811) and is not final; a reversal would alter the practical weight of this analysis.
2. Claims 2–9 and 19–51 verbatim text was not verified here; the mapping above is grounded in the petition/FWD record and should be checked against the patent's own claims.
3. The "Mitic" vs. "Herzog" identifier conflict for 2015/0163379 and the conflicting '697 title on the Ex. 1016 page are unresolved anomalies that should be corrected before any filing relying on these documents.
4. Several IPRs on the family (IPR2025-00265, -00266, -00313, -00314) are listed as filed but not instituted (procedural); they do not add substantive unpatentability holdings at this time.