ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,335,580, issued on June 17, was assigned to Signiant Inc. (Lexington, Mass.).

"Real-time streaming and playback of digital media" was invented by Jochen Strunk (Schoneck, Germany), Robert Martin Kruger (Darmstadt, Germany) and Thomas Meyer (Berlin).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present technology provides systems and methods to facilitate seek functionality in real-time streaming and playback of digital media. In particular, the present technology provides for generating an index for a digital media file encoded in a non-streaming format, determining a portion of the digital media file to transcode, and transcoding the portion of the...