While Disney+ subscribers were surely elated to see Dolby Vision return, the platform has just removed the format again in Europe.
Only a few months ago we were ready to celebrate Dolby Vision’s return on Disney+ without knowing what lay ahead. Even though this “return” needed some nuance, since it concerned only a portion of the platform’s users.
And it seems their joy was short-lived, as this format has just vanished in France and in several other European countries. If HDR10 and 4K UHD remain accessible, this could still penalize Disney+ in a race toward ever-higher image quality. So, what caused the removal and could it last? Here’s the full rundown.
No more Dolby Vision and 3D on Disney+ until further notice
Yet another hard blow for Disney+. Since mid-June 2026, Dolby Vision is once again unavailable on its catalog, and the issues don’t stop there. Moreover, 3D films—especially those compatible with Apple Vision Pro—have vanished from the catalog.
For the moment, only subscribers in Canada and the United States appear to be spared from this removal. This is problematic, since users in those regions still pay the full price (about $15.99 per month) without access to one of the major features on that plan.
Meanwhile, Disney+ has yet to offer a clear explanation: the streaming service has merely shifted its Dolby Vision content to HDR10. Behind the scenes, the reality isn’t exactly rosy…
A patent dispute in the backdrop, and rivals profiting
On the face of it, one might think the Dolby Vision removal is just a bug and that a patch will bring it back. In reality, it’s a patent dispute between Disney+ and InterDigital, the licensing company.
To understand what led to this, we should look at its major competitor Prime Video, which has just entered into a licensing deal with the same company on June 11. A few days later, InterDigital filed an injunction against Disney for infringement of a patent related to the HEVC codec. Coincidence?
In any case, this allows Prime Video to keep its HDR formats indefinitely, while Disney+ loses them. We must now await an appeal from the American company to hope to restore Dolby Vision on its VOD platform, and that could take months (perhaps even longer)…
