Disney+ is currently streaming with degraded picture quality as Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and 3D have vanished. A patent case in Germany is possibly spreading across Europe.
The streaming service previously suffered technical app issues, but these were resolved in September 2025.
In late 2025, German media outlets such as 4KFilme began observing that Dolby Vision and HDR10+ had disappeared from Disney+ in Germany. As a result, Disney+ Premium subscribers are limited to streaming in the HDR10 format, despite paying the full subscription price.
In January 2026, the German outlet Heise linked the situation to a patent lawsuit (link) at a German court, in which Disney is accused of infringing patents held by American company InterDigital. The court has issued an injunction that affects Disney+.
Now affecting Europe too
In February, reports have begun to surface on Reddit from Disney+ subscribers in countries such as France, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Poland. Dutch outlet Tweakers has reported on the issues in Netherlands.
Similar reports are now emerging in the Nordics on Flatpanels’ forums: Dolby Vision is no longer working on Disney+. FlatpanelsHD has confirmed the issue on our devices.
In a statement to FlatpanelsHD, Disney says that it relates to technical challenges. It has neither confirmed nor denied any link between the widespread issues in Europe and the patent case.
“Dolby Vision support for content on Disney+ is currently unavailable in several European countries due to technical challenges. We are actively working to restore access to Dolby Vision and will provide an update as soon as possible. 4K UHD and HDR support remain available on supported devices,” Disney said in a written response to Flatpanels today.
Disney+ has removed all references to Dolby Vision from its European support pages – even the US support pages.
3D movies on Disney+ have also disappeared in several European countries, as these are presented in Dolby Vision (on Apple Vision Pro).
When will it return?
If it is indeed a patent dispute, such things tend to drag on. At this time, there is no timeline for when HDR10+, Dolby Vision and 3D will return to Disney+.
InterDigital holds several thousand patents related to radio and video technology and has previously pursued cases against Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and others. The company has been described as a ‘patent troll’.
AWESOME, I hate Disney’s portrayal of non-Caucasian characters.
What’s a nom-Caucasian character? A crocodile? A shark?
Not entertain ignorance, research duckduckgo or just go to www.risingupwithsonali.com ‘s archive.
So they’ll decrease prices to adjust for the lower costs, right?
deleted by creator
Patent trolls are some of the only companies that make Disney actually the good guy for a change.
You have to be the worst scumbag on the planet if a patent troll looks decent standing next to you.
I don’t get why HDR+ was removed since it’s an open source format. Was it some sort of patent due to transporting HDR content?
I’m confused about that too.
InterDigital seems to claim that the patent in question is about dynamically overlaying multiple video streams e.g. from https://ir.interdigital.com/news-events/press-releases/news-details/2025/InterDigital-awarded-injunction-against-Disney-by-German-court-5ad043c60/default.aspx
The Munich Regional Court ruled that InterDigital is entitled to an injunction over Disney’s infringement of an InterDigital patent related to the streaming of video content using high dynamic range (HDR) technology. Disney can appeal the decision.
The judgment from the Munich court follows a separate decision from the same court to award InterDigital an injunction over Disney’s infringement of a patent which enables a method for dynamically overlaying a first video stream with a second video stream. It also follows a decision by a court in Brazil, to grant a preliminary injunction in InterDigital’s favor, after the court found that Disney infringed both of the InterDigital patents-in-suit.
What’s interesting is that HDR10 is still available on Disney supposedly. So it sort of sounds like the claim is that Disney is adding DV with HDR10+ fallback dynamically during the video stream… and maybe regular HDR is pre-generated by Disney hence is not affected by the patent. The solution might be to always have multiple pre-generated copies of video before the stream even takes place…that would be a lot of extra storage space Disney would need!
that would be a lot of extra storage space Disney would need!
I know very little but I doubt storage space is the biggest constraint on streaming infrastructure- even with today’s inflated prices, they (or their cloud provider) could add a petabyte of storage to each of their servers if they needed to for like $20k each, which is pennies in the grand scheme of things. They probably pre-encode these things anyways to save CPU resources - this isn’t a home Plex server, they’ve gotta encode for tens of millions of different devices simultaneously.
I think the bigger issue would be bandwidth - if you can’t dynamically switch streams you have to either serve them all at once or just commit to one at the start and re-buffer any time something changes.
I am far from an expert, but basically HD10 is a base layer, it ecodes and thus sends HDR data “once” per whole video.
Formats like HD10+ and DV are dynamic, they send HDR (brightness) information per scene/frame over an extra transport layer.
And those layers can be sent at the same time for the tv to use which one it prioritizes.From the info above it seems the patent is about the way both “streams” of the HDR formatted metadata are combined and transferred over the internet to the display device.
If this is the case, Disney might do some brainstorming on what is cheaper in the long run: Offer both HD10+ and Dolby Vision which is not a cheap license in itself, on top of which comes the license fee from the patent they infringe on … if they can’t find a workaround.
Or, go with a single HDR standard, in which case I can see them drop DV support altogether to save on (expensive DV) license fees.Regardless of this, I do not think the case is a positive development.
I only lament the potential loss of future HDR DSNP webrips 😔 but at least we’ll still have HDR from UHD rips
Disney+ has removed all references to Dolby Vision from its European support pages – even the US support pages.
3D movies on Disney+ have also disappeared in several European countries, as these are presented in Dolby Vision (on Apple Vision Pro).
At this time, there is no timeline for when HDR10+, Dolby Vision and 3D will return to Disney+.
InterDigital holds several thousand patents related to radio and video technology and has previously pursued cases against Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and others. The company has been described as a ‘patent troll’.
It’s paywalls all the way down
Sorry about that. Here’s the entire article:
Disney+ is currently streaming with degraded picture quality as Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and 3D have vanished. A patent case in Germany is possibly spreading across Europe.
The streaming service previously suffered technical app issues, but these were resolved in September 2025.
In late 2025, German media outlets such as 4KFilme began observing that Dolby Vision and HDR10+ had disappeared from Disney+ in Germany. As a result, Disney+ Premium subscribers are limited to streaming in the HDR10 format, despite paying the full subscription price.
In January 2026, the German outlet Heise linked the situation to a patent lawsuit (link) at a German court, in which Disney is accused of infringing patents held by American company InterDigital. The court has issued an injunction that affects Disney+.
Now affecting Europe too
In February, reports have begun to surface on Reddit from Disney+ subscribers in countries such as France, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Poland. Dutch outlet Tweakers has reported on the issues in Netherlands.
Similar reports are now emerging in the Nordics on Flatpanels’ forums: Dolby Vision is no longer working on Disney+. FlatpanelsHD has confirmed the issue on our devices.
In a statement to FlatpanelsHD, Disney says that it relates to technical challenges. It has neither confirmed nor denied any link between the widespread issues in Europe and the patent case.
“Dolby Vision support for content on Disney+ is currently unavailable in several European countries due to technical challenges. We are actively working to restore access to Dolby Vision and will provide an update as soon as possible. 4K UHD and HDR support remain available on supported devices,” Disney said in a written response to Flatpanels today.
Disney+ has removed all references to Dolby Vision from its European support pages – even the US support pages.
3D movies on Disney+ have also disappeared in several European countries, as these are presented in Dolby Vision (on Apple Vision Pro).
When will it return?
If it is indeed a patent dispute, such things tend to drag on. At this time, there is no timeline for when HDR10+, Dolby Vision and 3D will return to Disney+.
InterDigital holds several thousand patents related to radio and video technology and has previously pursued cases against Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and others. The company has been described as a ‘patent troll’.
lol, no, but thanks
I was commenting that even Disney has to deal with arbitrary paywalls
HEY! What’s up with this website’s data collection/cookie prompt? Feels like they made it hella confusing on purpose. If I’m “opted out” does that mean out of wanting to not have my data collected or does that mean a reconfirmation that I don’t want my data collected?
Disable JS by default with uBlock Origin. I can browse most web sites without any issue. All I saw there is: “Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason” which is massively moronic because enabling JS would increase the number of security issues.
It’s pretty common that they’ll make them easy to pick the wrong settings. It really sucks.
Also technically illegal in EU I believe.
Illegal but not being enforced at all. Just like the big green ‘Track me daddy’ button next to a small grey ‘refuse’ button. Or the ones that force you to go through a list of every partner and disable each separate one. Or etc… All those are illegal, but companies love testing the limits, and with the level of enforcement… Yeah
Sucks to suck
I wouldn’t have Disney+ if it wasn’t always cheaper or on special to be paired with Hulu. Hulu is great. I just worry as Disney makes it worse…
Too bad so sad
