The Walt Disney Company has started to roll out support for HDR10+ on the Disney+ and Hulu streaming services exclusively on Samsung TVs.
The company first revealed it’s planning to add support for HDR10+ way back in January at CES 2025, and Samsung has now confirmed it's making good on that promise. The company said HDR10+ support is being enabled for Samsung TVs from 2018 onwards, including its flagship OLED models, its Neo QLED sets and even its Crystal UHD TVs, will be the first to reap the benefits.
This is good news if you happen to own a Samsung TV and if you’re also a subscriber to Disney+, because it will have a noticeable impact on the picture quality of the service’s TV shows and movies. HDR10+ is a premium high dynamic range format that supports dynamic metadata on a scene-by-scene basis, just like Dolby Vision. It enables the TV to display a brighter and more contrast-rich picture, and will make movies look “better”, even on a mid-range TV.
Disney said HDR10+ support will come to more than 1,000 titles on Hulu first of all, before being added to Disney+ and additional Hulu titles later, presumably next year.
Disney+ and Hulu will both continue to offer their movies and shows in HDR10 and Dolby Vision to cater to TVs that don’t support HDR10+, but note that users must be subscribed to the Disney+ Premium plan to view its content in the higher quality format. That’s also true for anyone wanting to enjoy Dolby Atmos sound.
It’s a good update for Samsung TV owners because their TVs don’t support the alternative Dolby Atmos format. Samsung is the only major TV brand that refuses to do so, instead going all-in on HDR10+, which it helps to develop. Unfortunately, this means that Samsung TV owners don’t get to enjoy the kind of picture quality that it’s truly capable of, because a lot of streaming services don’t support HDR10+, instead focusing on Dolby Vision only. Disney, at least, is changing that.
With Disney+, users will be able to see some truly dazzling pictures, especially if they own one of Samsung's newest OLED models:
It’s not clear when other TVs will be able to experience HDR10+ on Disney+ and Hulu. TVs from brands such as Hisense, TCL, Panasonic and Philips also support HDR10+, as well as Dolby Vision, so we can hope that Disney will extend the capability to those brands later, too. LG Electronics and Sony do not support HDR10+, not even on their most premium models, instead choosing to support only Dolby Vision.
