First impressions on Nokia’s Technology Standards business

I’ve admired Nokia’s IPR business for a long-time, and now I have had the chance to take a look under the hood. I joined Nokia in November as Chief Licensing Officer New Segments in the Technology Standards business unit. The unit is responsible for driving wireless and multimedia research and standardization, protecting Nokia’s innovation by securing patents, and monetizing Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio through patent licensing. It is a world-class operation.

My role is to lead Nokia’s multimedia licensing programs and explore how Nokia can expand its licensing business into other new and emerging technology domains — leveraging the company’s strong heritage of innovation and intellectual property leadership. I have spent the past few weeks getting to know the team and the business. Here are some quick first impressions.

Foundational video portfolio

Nokia has an extremely strong portfolio, which is one of the reasons the team here was able to successfully conclude Nokia’s smartphone renewals in 2024 and sign a series of industry first agreements in automotive, IoT, and video streaming. We have over 26,000 patent families in our portfolio, up from around 20,000 five years ago. As well as 7,000+ patent families declared as essential to 5G, Nokia’s portfolio also includes over 5,000 inventions that enable multimedia products and services, including video compression, content delivery, and content recommendation technologies and aspects related to hardware. 

Innovating in video standardization

Nokia’s inventors have been heavily involved in the development of all market-adopted video codecs, from the H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard in the early 2000s to the H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard completed in 2020. This important work continues. Our team of experts are advancing a comprehensive set of contributions to help shape the upcoming H.267 next generation video coding standard. This includes proposals to improve prediction accuracy, filtering adaptability, and overall coding efficiency. For example, we are refining several core conventional coding tools for the Enhanced Compression Model (ECM). Plus, the team are doing exciting work in neural network–based video coding which will deliver measurable coding gains and reduced decoder runtime.

Leading the way in video services licensing

Nokia was the first of its peers to sign a patent license agreement with a video streaming platform and we continue to lead the way. So far, we have signed seven bilateral license agreements with video streaming companies. The most recent video streaming agreement was signed at the end of last year. I am also delighted to say that we recently signed a license agreement with Snap Inc as well as an agreement with a social messaging company. A big thank you to everyone involved in closing these deals. Litigation also continues against Paramount and Warner Bros, where we are confident about our position and the outcome of these commercial disputes. 

Thanks for the warm welcome

Finally, I would like to thank everyone at Nokia for the warm welcome. I’m looking forward to doing great things together in 2026.