ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,382,118, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to NETFLIX INC. (Los Gatos, Calif.).
"Staggered key frame video encoding" was invented by Aditya Mavlankar (San Francisco), Ioannis Katsavounidis (San Jose, Calif.) and Mark Watson (San Francisco).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "One embodiment of the invention sets forth a mechanism for encoding video streams associated with the same digital content such that switch points staggered across two video streams occur at every offset temporal distance. The offset temporal distance is less than the distance between two consecutive key frames in a given video stream. This enables a content player to switch t...