Disney’s now months-long patent dispute with the American technology firm InterDigital has entered a new phase. Unfortunately for Disney+ subscribers, it could result in the company once more being forced to withdraw support for 4K and HDR content.
The patent battle began last year when InterDigital, which holds various patents concerning HDR and the HEVC codec, sued Disney at the Unified Patent Court in Europe for allegedly infringing on its intellectual property.
The court imposed a brief injunction against Disney, and originally forced it to stop supporting Dolby Vision and 3D content in a number of European countries in February. However, Disney briefly won a reprieve, and the formats came back in the middle of March, only to disappear again in June when the court officially ruled in InterDigital’s favour.
InterDigital clearly hoped that ruling would bring Disney to the negotiating table and allow it to extract a licensing fee from the entertainment giant, but the opposite happened. Disney dug in its heels, vowed to appeal the ruling, and then suddenly, it restored 4K content – but not HDR – for some of its customers.
What Disney did is find a workaround by adopting the VP9 codec instead of HEVC, which allows it to stream 4K content without infringing on InterDigital’s patents. But support for 4K was limited to only a few devices such as newer LG TVs and devices running Google TV and Fire TV. It remained unavailable on Samsung TVs, Apple TV 4K boxes and games consoles.
However, if Disney thought that its backup plan was foolproof, it could be in for another nasty shock. That’s because InterDigital argues it also holds patents regarding the VP9 codec, and if it can prove that, it would mean Disney is still required to pay up.
In a statement to FlatpanelsHD, InterDigital explained that it’s expanding its litigation against Disney in the UPC because of its “ongoing infringement” of VP9 encoding technology. “Our position is clear; any use of VP9 continues to infringe our patented innovation,” the company’s legal officer Josh Schmidt said. “Disney cannot use it to avoid paying us fair royalties while also delivering an inferior experience to its customers.”
Schmidt added that the company first approached Disney and asked it to license its technology several years ago. “We would have preferred to conclude an amicable agreement then,” he said. “We went to court only because that route was closed to us.”
Disney’s decision to fight is unusual considering that rival streaming companies like Amazon have opted to bite the bullet and come to an agreement with InterDigital and pay it an unspecified amount of money to license its technology. It hasn’t spoken publicly about its reasons for the dispute, but it appears to be taking a principled stance, in line with many critics of InterDigital who claim that the company is little more than a “patent troll.” That’s an almost derogatory term used to describe companies that exist only to buy up patents relating to popular technologies so they can extract licensing revenue for them, without providing any actual value to anyone beyond that.
InterDigital is criticised because it doesn’t actually manufacture any consumer electronics or devices, and it has a history of engaging in aggressive litigation against major tech firms, having previously sued Amazon before it came to an arrangement, as well as Microsoft and Huawei in the past. But InterDigital denies being a patent troll and claims to be a research company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on foundational engineering for wireless, video and AI standards.
InterDigital clearly hasn’t given up on forcing Disney to cough up somehow, whether that’s by getting it to agree to pay a licensing fee or through court-imposed fines. But Disney’s decision to switch to VP9 suggests it’s determined not to give in. However, VP9 isn’t the greatest solution for Disney, because while it supports 4K streaming, it does not support HDR. Yet Disney continues to insist it’s working on restoring HDR and 4K to all European subscribers eventually. ‘
One possible solution for Disney might be to adopt the AV1 codec, which is open-source and free for anyone to use. It supports both 4K and HDR content, but the problem is that it’s not widely supported by TV and streaming hardware makers.
There’s also the new litigation to consider. The VP9 codec was originally designed by Google over a decade ago and meant to be a royalty-free codec, but InterDigital seems to believe it can still force Disney to stop using it. And if InterDigital can do that, who’s to say it couldn’t also find a way to prevent Disney from using AV1 to deliver 4K and HDR too?
