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’.
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.