Nokia inks three new multimedia patent licensing agreements, including with social media platform Snapchat

Context: In November, Tejas Shah, a former Senior Licensing Director at InterDigital, was appointed Nokia’s Chief Licensing Officer for New Segments, replacing Arvin Patel (November 5, 2025 ip fray article). The company had a busy year commercially and in litigation – it is currently embroiled in disputes against Warner Bros. Discovery (January 9, 2026 ip fray article and Paramount over video-related patents in the U.S., Brazil, the Unified Patent Court, and Germany (October 1, 2025 ip fray article).

What’s new: Mr. Shah revealed in a blog post today that Nokia’s multimedia licensing program has closed three deals in the past few weeks, including with Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat (a social media platform that mainly consists of video and photo messaging), and another social messaging company (January 14, 2026 Nokia blog post). He also noted that litigation continues against Paramount and Warner Bros, where Nokia is “confident” about its position and the outcome of these commercial disputes.

Direct impact: This is the first time Nokia is opening up the social messaging vertical in its video streaming licensing program, putting it ahead of its peers. As noted by Mr. Shah today, Nokia was also the first of its peers to sign a patent license agreement with a video streaming platform (the first public one was with Amazon: March 31, 2025 ip fray article).

Wider ramifications: Mr. Shah also discussed the work that his team is doing in advancing 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, he noted. For example, Nokia is refining several core conventional coding tools for the Enhanced Compression Model and working on neural network–based video coding, which will deliver measurable coding gains and reduced decoder runtime, Mr. Shah added.