Codec Wars Get Real: Lessons from Disney’s European 4K Blackout
At Streaming Media Connect 2026, Contributing Editor Jan Ozer and IP attorney Robert JL Moore broke down why Disney’s HDR pullback in Europe was inevitable—and why it will end in a license.
Streaming Media Connect 2026 featured a late-breaking session taken straight from the headlines: Disney’s European 4K blackout. About two weeks before the show, reports emerged that Disney had dropped 4K HDR in 11 European countries after losing a patent case. The session was added to explain what happened and what it means for everyone else.
On stage were Streaming Learning Center founder and Streaming Media Contributing Editor Jan Ozer, who consults on royalty calculations and streaming-related topics, and Robert JL Moore, an intellectual property attorney and entrepreneur in patent rights. Moore previously worked at Mintz Levin, founded OP Solutions in 2017–2018 as a partnership with Florida Atlantic University to participate in VVC standard setting, saw his patents become part of the Access Advance pool, and recently sold that VVC portfolio to Dolby. Moore said he has worked to help implementers understand the patent risk and cost of implementing a standard in a given market and to help SEP holders understand their FRAND obligations and how to monetize their SEPs.
Their topic was Disney, but there were a few reasons it drew a crowd goes beyond Disney, according to Ozer. First, the Disney-InterDigital dispute is a very prominent example of the mechanics of enforcement in real time—seeing a direct impact on QoS for paying subscribers. Second, Disney’s response is open to interpretation. As Ozer framed it, is Disney pushing back on new royalties for streaming rather than devices, or does it just need time to make a good decision? Is it posturing or delaying? The answer will affect every streaming service and, perhaps, the quality of service they provide customers.
Ozer thanked Moore for sharing his opinions but stated multiple times that they were just that, not legal advice. Companies making royalty-related decisions should check with their IP attorneys before doing so.
Note that the speakers’ comments have been lightly edited for readability.
The discussion started with Ozer reciting the facts and current status.
A Short History of InterDigital vs. Disney
Disney+ in the EU has two tiers: a premium tier for €15.99 a month that comes with 4K HDR, and a standard tier at €10.99 for 1080p SDR. In 2025, InterDigital sued Disney for infringing patents covering HEVC and dynamic HDR—HDR10 Plus and Dolby Vision, and other technologies not relevant to the discussion.
There were multiple rounds of cases. The first was in the Munich Regional Court, where the court found that Disney infringed InterDigital’s patents, but the scope of the injunction granted was Germany only. At that point, Disney dropped Dolby Vision and HDR10 Plus in Germany, then fell back to HDR10, which is static metadata, and then dropped just to SDR entirely.
The next significant round involved the Unified Patent Court, which has a footprint of 11 countries in Europe. The UPC found that the asserted patents were valid and infringed. It rejected Disney’s FRAND defense and ruled that a transmitted stream is a product.
As Ozer summarized: “The Court ruled that the bitstream was infringing. So, it’s not a decoder, it’s not an encoder, it’s the bitstream itself.” The Court enjoined Disney from distributing the encoded HEVC streams in all 11 markets.
Disney’s response was to drop HEVC and HDR from all 11 jurisdictions and substitute VP9 for 4K on supported platforms. Figure 1 shows the before and after views regarding 4K and HDR.
Figure 1. Before and after Disney responded to InterDigital’s injunction
Before the switch, platforms compatible with both VP9 and HEVC, which included Apple TVs, Samsung smart TVs, and many game consoles, enjoyed both 4K and HDR. After, while some platforms continued to play 4K using VP9, HDR was completely unavailable. As Ozer noted: “None are playing dynamic HDR or any HDR at all as far as I can tell. And premium subscriptions still cost five euros more.”
The Pattern of SEP Licensing
Moore, whose LinkedIn resume includes a stint as a standup comic, advised the audience not to panic. “I want to invite everyone to step back from the ledge. We have seen this pattern before. And I think it’s going to end okay. I think we’re going to end up in an equilibrium that people can live with.”
He described a recurring pattern: “You have an existing segment that adopts some new features. These new features are often implemented elsewhere subject to existing licensing programs. Companies in this new segment lack the industry expertise or personnel to assess patent risk at the outset. So, they’re entering it blind and aren’t ready for people to come knocking at their door asking for patent royalties. And they’re definitely not ready for the magnitude of that ask.
“Then there’s a negotiation. I call it price discovery because sometimes it looks like a negotiation and sometimes it looks like litigation. Both are normal,” Moore continued. “Regardless of whether you’re seeking an injunction or just damages, it’s really just an extension of licensing. The licensing discussions continue in the background in almost all cases throughout litigation.”
The Five Stages of Grief
Moore calls it the five stages of grief because segments new to the prospect of paying patent royalties often react in a predictable, almost psychological way. He illustrated the progression with a personal anecdote from the automotive market in 2014–2015, when he represented Advanced Silicon Technologies (AST) in an International Trade Commission investigation. Specifically, AST was asserting patents acquired from AMD against multiple auto companies.
As Moore described, “Around 2014 and 2015, we saw automobiles, which previously competed on the basis of horsepower, power windows, and similar features, increasingly competing on what their dashboard screens would show. This included features that were pervasive in phones.” His ITC investigation targeted those automakers for features that were licensed in other technologies. He described the process as follows (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The five stages of grief pattern of SEP adoption
1. Denial
“Their initial reaction was denial,” Moore said. “We’re not the ones who pay royalties. Go ask the phone guys. Go ask the tablets, not us.”
Then Moore described the parallel to streaming. “Similarly with streaming companies today, the content providers are the ones who were previously and to some extent justifiably said, we adopted these codecs thinking that we were free riders and now you’re telling me that we’re not.”
He added that, until recently, the codec licensing ecosystem treated them as free riders, albeit free riders without actual licenses or anything that would legally insulate them from owing patent royalties. This allowed them to implement HEVC without being targeted by many licensing campaigns. That is changing.
2. Anger
In Moore’s words, “the second reaction is typically anger... Okay, this is important functionality, but you shouldn’t get money for this because you’re talking about an infinitesimally small part of the overall functionality, and a small part of the overall value of the car. And by the way you’re not the right type of plaintiff, you’re just a patent assertion vehicle.”
On streaming, Moore related, “I’ve seen a lot of people in the industry call the HEVC patent holders who are seeking royalties as greedy. Words to that effect. That’s anger.”
3. Bargaining
The third stage is bargaining. “When the negotiations break down and you wind up in court, implementers will assert that your royalty... demands are too high. If we pay them then there’s going to be nothing left for all the other features. There’s going to be nothing left for me.”
He continued, “that always happens, and you saw that with streamers as well who said ‘we’ll just replace this functionality. Not only are your demands too high to justify the feature, we don’t even need your technology to enable this feature.’"
4. Depression
The next stage was depression. “You have the sad sacks targeted in the ITC action stating that if you award these royalties, we’re not going to have any cars or no one’s going to be able to afford them... Similarly, streamers will just take away these features that consumers are paying for.”
Disney’s removal of 4K HDR in the 11 countries is Stage 4, Moore argued. His response: “You may have marginally worse TV in the EU right now. This will pass.”
5. Acceptance
Finishing the ITC story, Moore shared that “within a year of us launching this program, then we licensed all the targets.” After licensing, Moore said, the automotive industry became educated and more active in IP. Hyundai and Kia began participating in standards, including MPEG standards. Companies began proactively clearing risk through defensive aggregators and Avanci’s 3GPP pool, which covers 4G and 5G.
Relating to Disney, Moore reported, “on the streaming side, you’re seeing some companies affirmatively move to clear the risk. So, you have Meta and ByteDance joining the Access Advance pool. There are plenty of others.
Moore’s summary of the cycle: “Streamers, first they’re mad and deny it, then they try to point to other ways around this liability, then they’re sad, and then they just get on with it. And I think that’s what’s happening.”
The Prediction: Disney Will License
Moore’s prediction tied directly back to Disney: “I think eventually companies like Disney will find that it’s not worth their while to keep fighting these patent assertions. Patent owners can obtain a valid bitstream claim in the EU, a finding of infringement, and an injunction preventing operation in the EU.
“To operate in the EU, streamers like Disney, will license the InterDigital portfolio so they can deliver the features customers are already paying for.”
Why? Moore’s core economic argument is this. “The real reason is that patent costs are relatively immaterial. They’re very small relative to the overall costs of implementing a codec, relative to the benefits of implementing a codec.”
To this point, though not mentioned during the session, it’s worth sharing an effective rate table produced by Access Advance relating to its Video Distribution Patent (VDP) Pool (Figure 3). Briefly, the VDP pool has three measurements, monthly users (for AVOD and FAST services), subscribers (SVOD) and percentage of revenue (all services). To compute the applicable royalty, services apply all applicable methods, and the highest amount is the royalty. As you can see, the royalties are tiered by volume.
Figure 3. Effective rates for each metric
Access Advance data presented separately from the session supports that claim:
The effective rate table reflects median royalties in each tier. At the Base tier, it shows $0.0042 per average monthly active video user in region 1 and $0.0417 per monthly video subscriber, or 0.50% of streaming revenue. The rate falls to 0.41%, 0.30%, 0.22%, 0.20% and under 0.20% in Tiers 1 through 5.
Avanci Video publishes a separate rate, and individual patent owner licensors such as InterDigital, Nokia and Dolby license separately. The combined stack is higher than either pool alone. However, even if Access Advance represents only half the total royalty stack once bilaterals such as Nokia and InterDigital are added, the total likely remains a small percentage of revenue—a point favorable to both pool organizations and a strong counter to claims that royalties make 4K HDR uneconomical, particularly when you’re getting paid € 5 to deliver it.
Moore finished this section by sharing his thoughts on royalty-free codecs, stating, “If someone says to you that a given codec is royalty-free, you ask them, will they indemnify you? Because if they’re not, then it’s not royalty-free.”
For the record, neither the Alliance for Open Media nor Google offers indemnity. He continued, “it’s also the case that it’s demonstrably not royalty-free in that companies are presently paying to implement these codecs.”
Moore noted that as of November 2025, AOM no longer markets AV1 as a “royalty-free video format" as it did in 2018. Its site now describes AV1 as developed “under a royalty-free patent policy”—a distinction Moore said matters because that policy only binds AOM members, not patent holders who didn’t join AOM. Those patent holders are unaffected by the AOM encumbrance, and neither AOM nor Google offers indemnification.
Along the same lines, Moore said a multi-codec world is inevitable not because of codec quality, but because of silicon. Major mobile and TV SoC suppliers like Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple and Samsung build one global chip, and countries like Brazil mandate HEVC and VVC for broadcast. AOM codecs are already implemented in many chipsets. TV chipsets will therefore support MPEG and AOM codecs, creating an installed base that streamers can support.
Looking ahead, Moore predicted, “I think we’ll have a bright future for the MPEG codecs. I think there’s probably also a pretty good future for the AOM codecs.”
Q&A Summary—Major Questions
You had several prepared questions, then audience questions came in. The major exchanges were:
Disney-Related Questions
Ozer: Switching from HEVC to VP9 gives Disney immediate operational relief but both are included in both the Access Advance and Avanci pools. So, is pivoting to VP9 or AV1 a viable long-term defense? Or does that simply reset the clock?
Moore: Well, it resets the clock insofar as there will need to be a new finding of infringement. So, a new action that involves allegations that involve the new source of infringement will need to work its way through the courts... But I think it’s likely that InterDigital has already identified at least some patents to Disney that it thinks are infringed by VP9 or AV1 in the course of the ongoing licensing discussions.
So, Disney will be implementing these standards aware that they were doing so while infringing InterDigital’s patents...These are facts that could cut against them in deciding whether to enter into another injunction or some other relief. I note that the UPC can award damages. So perhaps that’s on the table.”
Ozer: Do the German and UPC judgments put Disney on notice that they’re infringing worldwide or does each jurisdiction make their own determination as to what’s infringing?
Moore: Each jurisdiction is going to make its own determination, but they can take notice in some cases of other findings... Let’s say there are InterDigital claims from another patent in another country that are substantially the same as those that were found infringing in Germany. And let’s say that Disney’s implementation of HEVC infringes in materially the same way as it does in Germany. Then that could negatively impact Disney and could support a finding of willful infringement, I think.”
General Questions
Ozer: When will we absolutely know that transmitting a bitstream is royalty-bearing?
Moore: Well, you presently know that because companies are paying royalties on it right?
Ozer: Some companies aren’t. Meta jumped in, but Google’s not. Netflix isn’t.
Moore: You never know for certain. There’s always going to be at least some edge cases that require litigation. When will there be a general industry understanding that this is something that streamers should pay for? I don’t have a date certain, but [probably, at some point].
Ozer: Would you share your thoughts on encoder-claimed SEPs, when in reality the standard only describes stream semantics and decoding, not the encoder itself?
Moore: I think it’s in all parties’ interests to treat the encoder claims as standard-essential. Because otherwise you’re dealing with a non-FRAND universe on the one hand, and on the other hand you’re complicating the mechanisms for licensing that have worked for a long time from the licensor perspective.
Ozer: Since some VPNs can span across geo-blocking, how are royalties enforced at that point?
Moore: So, the easy part of that is that the devices themselves, their location, the one that’s decoding are going to be the act of infringement there. The sale of one of those devices, the importation, the use, those various acts are going to occur in a given country, [and] that’s not going to be affected by the VPN.
The act of generating the bitstream will occur in some country. Whether there’s a VPN or not, that can ultimately be determined. A user in one country could use a VPN to circumvent the geo-blocking in that country. I don’t know that [practice] is widespread enough in any country to affect how the parties would approach a licensing discussion.
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