Spreading from Germany across Europe

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’.

  • Billygoat@piefed.socialEnglish
    33·
    14 hours ago

    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?

    • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      17·
      12 hours ago

      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/HDR10+ 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!

      I’m also curious how DV (Dolby Vision) factors into all of that. If I had to guess Disney is dynamically adding DV with HDR fallback as an extra stream in the video, so by removing that you end up with only SDR and HDR10 options… but again that’s just a guess.