The Walt Disney Company has once again removed access to Dolby Vision and 3D content on the Disney+ streaming service in Europe following a new court ruling in a long-running patent dispute.
Dolby Vision and 3D content vanished from the Disney+ app across Europe in early February, following reports from users in Germany that it had disappeared in that country even earlier. But by the middle of March, the company had restored access to its high-definition content library in all EU countries, with the exception of Germany.
The reason is that the original patent case involving the U.S. firm InterDigital only applied to Germany. InterDigital holds patents relating to a number of technologies that enable streaming and HDR. When Disney pulled its Dolby Vision and 3D content from other European nations in February, this appears to have been a precautionary measure that was removed when the company realized that the lawsuit didn’t affect its broader EU operations.
However, the streaming giant has once again cut off access. FlatepanelsHD reported that it has received complaints from users across the continent who say that Dolby Vision HDR and 3D content have been pulled from Disney+’s app yet again.
This is likely because InterDigital this week scored a key victory in the patent case at the Unified Patent Court in Mannheim, Germany, which ruled that its order is enforceable across the entire EU.
"The Mannheim Local Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) ruled that InterDigital is entitled to an injunction over Disney's infringement of an InterDigital patent covering certain video encoding techniques related to HEVC and confirmed the validity of this patent,” the American company said. “The UPC is a pan-European patent court which issues decisions that apply across multiple countries in the European Union (EU); here, the injunction against Disney spans 11 EU countries.”
The removal of 3D titles from Disney+’s European content library is likely because of the way this is tied to Dolby Vision HDR. Disney has also deleted all references to Dolby Vision from across its European language support pages. However, the company’s full catalog of 4K and HDR10 content is still available to watch in European countries. In the U.S. and other regions, nothing has changed.
In a statement to FlatpanelsHD, Disney Nordic said that the European patent court ruling meant that it was required to “make changes to the availability of Dolby Vision and 3D” in Denmark and several neighboring countries.
“We are disappointed that we have had to do this, and we share our customers' frustration,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Disney+ continues to support the highest-quality formats, including up to 4K UHD and HDR, and we are actively exploring options to address the recent changes to ensure that we deliver the best possible viewing experience tailored to customers' devices and subscription plans."
One possible option is an appeal, but if Disney did decide to fight the ruling, it would probably have to endure a lengthy process, with no guarantee that it could get a temporary stay of the injunction that prevents it from showing Dolby Vision content in the EU. The other course of action would be to just bite the bullet, reach an agreement with InterDigital and start paying for whatever technologies it’s now legally required to license.
That’s the route taken by Amazon, which reportedly reached a settlement with InterDigital last week, enabling it to continue showing Dolby Vision content on the Amazon Prime Video streaming service.
