Samsung will be able to access Nokia’s video standards innovations after the pair reached a licensing agreement.
Nokia has invested more than $154 billion in R&D over the past two decades and built a portfolio of over 20,000 patent families (of which, around 3,500 patent families are considered essential to 5G.)
Jenni Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies, said:
“We are delighted to have reached an agreement with Samsung which further validates Nokia’s decades-long investments to R&D and contributions to multimedia and video technology standards.”
Under the agreement, Samsung will make undisclosed royalty payments to Nokia in return for access to the Finnish giant’s video standards patents.
Nokia says it contributes its inventions to open standards in return for the right to license them on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
Engineers from Nokia have been awarded numerous awards for their work in the fields of video research and standardisation.
In January, Nokia’s Media Technologies Research department won the company’s fourth Technology and Engineering Emmy award. The department played a major role in the development of ISO Base Media File Format, which is also part of the MPEG-4 standard.
Ville-Veikko Mattila, Head of Merdia Technologies Research at Nokia Technologies, commented at the time:
“We are proud that our work in the field of video research and standardisation has been recognised with an Emmy Award for the fourth time.”
The last Emmy awarded to Nokia was in June last year for the pioneering development of the charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor.
Samsung itself is certainly no slouch in patents. Last month, a patent essentiality study (registration required) conducted by Berlin-based market intelligence firm IPlytics ranked the South Korean technology giant first in 5G Standard Essential Patent (SEP) shares.
