Huawei has recently filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the European media group RTL at the Mannheim Regional Court of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), alleging that its streaming service infringes a Huawei-held MPEG DASH video encoding patent. This move is seen as a countermeasure to RTL’s earlier initiative to seek the revocation of the patent.

On 15 April 2026, Huawei filed a statement of claim with the Mannheim Regional Court of the UPC, alleging that RTL had infringed its patent EP2493191, entitled ‘Method, apparatus and system for hierarchical request of content in an HTTP streaming system’. Details of the case were made public on 4 May; the panel consists of Presiding Judge Prof. Peter Tochtermann, Judge Tobias Sender and Judge Goda Ambrasaitė-Balynienė.

This litigation dates back to November 2025, when the RTL Group initiated revocation proceedings against Huawei’s other MPEG DASH patent EP2945339 (“Method and apparatus for regulating streaming data transmission”) at the UPC Central Court in Paris, and applied for access to the case files of the Nokia v. Amazon case to assess its own risks.

The patented technology in question aims to reduce video buffering through a “tiered request” mechanism, whereby devices prioritise data requests to local caching servers before escalating to higher-tier servers when necessary, thereby optimising the internet streaming experience.

Headquartered in Luxembourg, the RTL Group primarily operates in the German, French, Hungarian and Spanish markets, owning over 52 television channels, 37 radio stations and six major streaming platforms. In Germany, its channels hold a 25–28% share of key target audiences. By 2025, its paid subscriber base reached 8.1 million, representing a year-on-year increase of 19%; its flagship products, RTL+ and M6+, both offer video-on-demand and ad-supported video-on-demand services.

It is worth noting that, as one of the main contributors to the Avanci Video platform, Huawei is a core licensor of this patent pool and, together with several other Avanci Video licensors, is currently pursuing video patent litigation against Disney in Europe and the US. Among these, Huawei and Sharp have filed a lawsuit against Disney at the Munich Regional Court I and have extended their action to the UPC.