Cloud Gaming & Streaming

Sony received 4 patents covering several distinct problems in cloud game streaming. One addresses what happens when a player's connection drops mid-session: rather than letting the game simply stall, a server-side system switches to a low-bandwidth side channel, sends the player text messages describing what is happening in the session, and can either accept game commands through the phone or hand control to an autoplay mode that moves the player's avatar away from danger. A second patent targets one-way latency by having the client compute a target display time for each decoded frame, coordinating that schedule with the server's flip-time and scan-out start rather than waiting for the next system VSYNC, and factoring in a scan-out speed derived from the hardware's maximum pixel clock. The third patent covers a jump-in feature where a player watching a recorded session can pick any moment, and the server reconstructs that exact game state by replaying stored inputs from a saved snapshot forward to the chosen point before handing the player live control. The fourth addresses the bandwidth spikes caused by large keyframes, allowing the server to blur, downscale, rotate, or mirror those frames before encoding and then signaling the client to reverse the transformation, so the I-frame costs less to transmit on constrained networks.

Adeia received 2 patents, both focused on the encoding side of cloud and console game streaming. The first describes a system in which a console acts as a game server for remote friends, using a single encoder and a single RTP stream for all connected clients, with the bitrate automatically adjusted to match whichever client is experiencing the worst congestion. If a client's bandwidth falls below a usable threshold, that player is moved to a separate spectator stream and an AI modeled on that player's style takes over their in-game character. The second patent takes a different approach to encoding quality under a bitrate cap, running multiple encoders on the same frame in parallel and using a variational autoencoder to predict how many parallel encodes a given frame actually warrants, then selecting the best result after encoding rather than tuning a quantizer in advance. That system also includes a path for a game engine to request lower buffer latency, pausing encoding while the buffer drains before resuming with a forced IDR frame.

InterDigital Patent Holdings received 1 patent describing a signaling protocol designed to reduce latency in wireless cloud gaming sessions. The scheme allows a phone or headset and an edge server to exchange marshaled neural network data in categorized, acknowledged messages, covering types such as distributed network data, in-game play data, and action predictions. Because each side explicitly acknowledges receipt of each data category rather than treating all exchanges the same way, the protocol keeps both endpoints synchronized on what has been received and what category of information it belongs to.

Microsoft received 1 patent covering the process of selecting which version of a game to launch for a player in a remote streaming context. Instead of presenting the user with a choice among hosted versions of a title, the service automatically evaluates context information gathered at the time of the launch request alongside stored data about available game versions, then decides which version to run on the player's behalf. The selection step is handled entirely by the service, removing the decision from the user's side of the interaction.