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'.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
174 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
80744 readers
3703 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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!