MANUAL ASSESSMENT OF SK TELECOM's PATENT PORTFOLIO IN RELATION TO VVC STANDARD
This report presents a comprehensive essentiality analysis of SK Telecom’s patent portfolio with respect to the VVC/H.266 standard.
SK Telecom significantly contributes to VVC development, with 126 unique patent families identified. This report aims to delve into the VVC patent landscape, focusing on the essential technologies that are critical to standard compliance. Though VVC was finalised in 2020, its design anticipates future media trends, offering support for emerging applications such as 8K video, 360-degree content, light field imaging, and adaptive streaming.
What you’ll get:
An extensive search of patent databases yielded an initial dataset of around 12,000 patents in our categories of interest and the extracted dataset is before the publication of first version of HEVC i.e., 2013. Of these, around 6k unique patent publications are categorised as VVC, based on their abstracts, summaries and claims related to H.266 technology. This process included analyzing the claims, abstracts, and detailed descriptions within the patent documents to assess their relevance w.r.t VVC.
To determine the essentiality of a patent, each claim is compared to the H.266 standard to identify whether the patented claim's elements are present in the standard. Essentiality is checked w.r.t all versions of VVC/H.266 respectively as improvements have been gradually implemented to address evolving technological demands in VVC.
Patented claim is compared to the standard and if every element of the claim aligns with the H.266 specifications, the patent is considered essential. On the other hand, if any element is not present or there is a contradiction between the claim and the standard (e.g., conflicting requirements or descriptions), the patent is considered non-essential. This manual evaluation process ensures that only patents fully aligned with the H.266 standard's requirements are classified as essential.
Below is an example of the analysis of one of SK Telecom's patents:
