On October 7, 2026, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) of South Korea filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware against The Walt Disney Company and its streaming-related subsidiaries, alleging infringement of HEVC/H.265 video coding patents. Previously, ETRI had approached Disney regarding a license through Access Advance’s VDP patent pool, but Disney did not accept the license offer.

In addition to ETRI, the plaintiffs in this case include the Kyung Hee University Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, the Korea Aerospace University Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, and the Kwangwoon University Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation. They allege that Disney and its subsidiaries—including Hulu, ESPN, and BAMTech—have infringed five U.S. standard-essential patents: 11,595,643, 10,021,416, 10,194,168, 10,742,996, and 10,003,820. These patents cover video compression technologies used in HEVC/H.265-compliant video formats, involving various stages of user content encoding and decoding. The accused products are the Disney+, Hulu, Hulu Live, and ESPN streaming services, which use HEVC during the encoding and decoding processes.

ETRI stated that the patents in question have been incorporated into Access Advance’s VDP patent pool. Access Advance contacted Disney regarding this patent pool project in December 2024 and signed a confidentiality agreement in February 2025. Subsequently, in November 2025, the patent pool provided a list of patents containing the patents in question; the list was updated again in September 2026, but Disney has yet to accept the VDP pool license.

The VDP pool license covers SEPs for four major video codec standards—HEVC (H.265), VVC (H.266), VP9, and AV1—and applies to the transmission and processing of content in streaming services. Currently, the pool has eight licensees: Beijing Youku Media, ByteDance, Kuaishou Technology, NTT DOCOMO, Roku, Tencent USA, Zhejiang Alibaba Communication Technology, and Meta Platforms.

ETRI is currently seeking damages and requesting that the court declare that it has fulfilled its applicable RAND licensing obligations. This is not ETRI’s only recent enforcement action: In July 2026, ETRI sued Snap over HEVC patents, including the five asserted in this case against Disney, as well as U.S. Patent No. 9,883,182. Subsequently, ETRI filed another lawsuit against Snap at the UPC, asserting EP 3614668.