In a surprising escalation of Disney’s streaming patent infringement struggles, the company temporarily removed support for 4K UHD and HDR streaming in eleven European markets. Though the quality downgrade is only temporary, this is perhaps the most significant example to date of a technology patent dispute directly impacting consumers at scale. This is a rare case of millions of paying subscribers losing premium features, away from the usual headlines about lawsuits and licensing deals. Faultline readers may remember our recent coverage of InterDigital’s Unified Patent Court (UPC) ruling against Disney, where few expected Disney would pursue a significant technical workaround rather than immediately resolve the dispute through a patent license agreement with InterDigital. Faultline said at the time that a modified encoding pipeline was one option for Disney to chase if it wanted to avoid the immediate impact…