Adaptive Streaming Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
Adaptive Streaming and Transport Patents: Filing Trends and Where the Claim Space Sits
36.7% concentration. The top five assignees alone account for 1,369 of 3,731 records in scope — over a third of the field sits with a handful of filers. Annual filings ran as high as 434 in 2017. The comparison the dataset supports without relying on lagging years is 2021 to 2024: filings fell from 307 to 188, a -39% move over three years. Treat 2025 and 2026 figures as provisional; they will revise upward as publications catch up with filing dates.
- 1TELEFONAKTIEBOLAGET LM ERICSSON (PUBL)10.4%
- 2QUALCOMM INC10.2%
- 3NOKIA TECHNOLOGIES OY6.7%
- 4COMCAST CABLE COMM LLC5.4%
- 5ADEIA GUIDES INC3.9%
See the full adaptive streaming and transport analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions on adaptive streaming patents
Who holds the most patents in adaptive bitrate streaming?
The ranking of 100 assignees in this dataset shows a clear leader with 389 records, more than double the fifth-place holder’s 146. The top five assignees combined hold 1,369 of the 3,731 records in scope, or 36.7% of the field. That concentration means a small number of portfolios — spanning telecom equipment vendors, chipset makers and content platform operators — cover a disproportionate share of the core buffer, bandwidth and manifest claims.
Is adaptive streaming patent filing still growing?
No — filing peaked in 2017 at 434 records and has declined since. The clearest confirmed comparison is 2021 to 2024, where filings dropped from 307 to 188, a -39% move. The 2025 and 2026 counts in the raw data look even lower, but that reflects publication lag of roughly eighteen months rather than an actual collapse in filing activity, so those two years should not be read as evidence of a continuing decline.
What does US10728305B2 actually cover?
US10728305B2, assigned to AT&T Intellectual Property, covers determining a video segment’s bitrate from buffer occupancy, requesting a chunk at that bitrate, and requesting a second chunk — generally at a different bitrate — if the first does not arrive within a set time threshold. The mechanism is notable for tying bitrate adaptation to a timeout condition rather than purely to bandwidth estimation. Anyone implementing chunk-timeout-driven bitrate fallback should review the granted claims directly rather than relying on the abstract.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Adaptive Streaming and Transport covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.