If you’ve been following the Sports Analytics Patent Forecast®, you’ve probably seen a patent asset or two owned by Verizon and thought, “what are they doing there?” While it might seem odd to find a telecommunications giant in a sector outside of 5G, Verizon’s 2015 acquisition of Yahoo! and its affiliate Yahoo! Sports to form the Verizon subsidiary Verizon Media has left them with a decent amount of patent assets in the sector. Most of these patent assets relate to Yahoo! Sports’ core businesses in fantasy sports and media presentation, placing Verizon as the number six assignee over the past five years in the Data Applications category. This could soon change with Verizon’s May 3, 2021 announcement that it is selling off Yahoo! and AOL to a private equity firm to focus more on development of 5G infrastructure for a total loss of $4.6 billion.

The buyer, Apollo Global Management, a well-known private equity firm, seems to be a much better fit for the media brands as it attempts to provide some much needed capital to the brand. It was having its already small bottom line siphoned off to fund Verizon’s telecommunications development, leaving it nothing to invest in its own development. This transaction, which is likely to be completed in the latter half of 2021, could have some major implications on the future patent landscape in the Data Application side of the Patent Radian® . With this influx of capital, it is likely the new company, Yahoo (sans the exclamation point), will begin filing more applications, possibly leveraging its earlier priority dates. If so, small companies within the Broadcast Enhancement and Fantasy Games subcategories could possibly get squeezed out if their technology overlaps with that of Yahoo.

On the other hand, it is possible this recent transaction could present a buyout opportunity for some smaller companies within Yahoo’s space. Yahoo’s main competitor within the fantasy sports space, Disney (ESPN), is well ahead with seventeen (17) patent assets in the subcategory compared to Yahoo’s four (4). If Yahoo feels that it does not have time to build a portfolio to match Disney’s, it could very well use this new capital to buy out one of the smaller companies with a larger portfolio to give it an edge and more building blocks. If this is the case, the company Fantech Software would make a great target as it is relatively new to the scene and has had recent success in getting patents granted.