Disney+ appears to have started restoring streaming quality in the UK

Disney appears to have begun rolling back the bandwidth restrictions imposed in March on the Disney+ streaming service. The company says it started this in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Disney has informed Forbes that all restrictions in the United Kingdom and Ireland have been lifted. Users report varying experiences on Twitter. some to see In fact, the full 4k resolution is being achieved again, including support for Dolby Atmos and the usual bitrates of the period before March. others report that there is still no Dolby Atmos available with at least some titles that support it.

Presumably this is a gradual recovery of Disney+ streaming quality. It is not known when it will be the turn of other European countries. At the moment it is possible to play a number of streams including Dolby Atmos, but for example with The Mandolorian that does not work; that’s where it gets stuck on Dolby Digital Plus. Netflix already seemed to have started to gradually restore the quality of its streams in May; the company did not want to give any further information about this at the time.

Forbes author John Archer writes that the timing of the lifting of restrictions coincides with Hamilton’s debut, a film adaptation of the Broadway musical of the same name. This title will be available on Disney+ on July 3rd and includes support for Dolby Atmos. This concerns the lossy variant, which does not use Dolby TrueHD but Dolby Digital Plus.

In mid-March, it emerged that EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton spoke to Netflix about the possibility of lowering the resolution of the streams. It soon became apparent that Netflix had lowered the quality of its video streams and many other streaming services followed suit. These measures arose out of fears that capacity problems could arise, given the significant increase in working from home due to the corona crisis. Many providers indicated that they did not expect any problems.