- Dolby Vision HDR is back for Disney+ viewers in Europe
- Feature was removed due to a legal dispute
- Patent lawsuits are an ongoing issue for streamers
Disney+ has brought back Dolby Vision HDR to European viewers, one month after the feature was removed for many subscribers in the Disney+ app and on its Apple’s Vision Pro 3D movies, which also use Dolby Vision.
Disney originally said that the removal was due to “technical challenges”, which lots of people assumed meant “we’re in the middle of a patent dispute” because Disney+ was in the middle of a patent dispute. And now in a statement, Disney+ has confirmed that yes, the removal was because of a patent dispute.
Speaking to FlatpanelsHD, Disney+ said: “As a result of a lawsuit at a German patent court, we were forced to make changes to the availability of certain advanced video formats in Germany and other markets.” But now Dolby Vision and the 3D Vision Pro movies are back.
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If you’re one of the affected subscribers, updating the app should fix it.
Where there’s a streaming hit, there’s a writ
There’s a lot of litigation around video streaming: to take just one example, Nokia has filed lawsuits against Amazon, Hisense, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount over video codecs and streaming technology. Disney, Amazon and Netflix have all been the subject of video patent-related litigation, as have all kinds of electronics manufacturers.
In this particular court case, the claimant was InterDigital, which holds nearly 12,000 patents for video technology alone, and like many such companies it filed suits in multiple places: Brazil, California and in multiple jurisdictions in Germany.
The reason for the lawsuits is because video technologies have many parents. They are typically built on top of previous technologies, many of which will have been patented by the organisations they came from. That means a video format such as HEVC features hundreds of patents held by all kinds of companies including Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Microsoft, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVCKenwood and many others.
In tech, patent holders often work together in what’s known as a patent pool. It’s not a new idea — the first patent pool was for sewing machines in the 1800s — but it’s become an important one in sectors such as streaming where there are tons of patents relating to the tech.
Companies that want to use tech such as HEVC can pay for a license to use the patent pool, and that gives them the right to use all of the technology that the pool’s patents cover. You can the very long list of HEVC licensees here.
Patent owners are very keen to ensure that they get paid by anyone who uses technology they have the patents for, and those licences don’t come cheap: for example Access Advance’s patent pool for HEVC, VVC, AV1 and VP9 codecs costs from $1.167 million per month to $5.25 million per month depending on the size of the streamer and its audience (although to be fair, that highest tier only applies to a couple of very big organizations).
Reports suggest that some patent owners demand even more: sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
When you see the sums of money involved it’s not surprising that patent owners are so keen to take streamers to court. The Disney+ case in Germany wasn’t the first such suit, and it definitely won’t be the last. But at least the app is back to normal, and the three affected Vision Pro owners should be pretty pleased too.
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