The Disney+ app may not work on a large number of smartphones due to problems related to the copyright management system
Starting November 12 in the United States, Walt Disney Company will launch its new streaming movie, cartoon and TV series service called Disney+. The anticipation for this Netflix competitor is high, especially because Disney+ will have an exceptional catalog.
But not everyone will be able to enjoy it on their smartphones. In fact, the smartphones not compatible with Disney+ could be really many. It all depends on “Widevine”, a DRM rights management system designed by Google. Almost all streaming video services use Widevine to make sure that the user can’t watch on his Android smartphone contents not intended for his country. Even Netflix uses Widevine, but that doesn’t mean that if Netflix runs on our smartphone then Disney+ will also run on it. The thing, in fact, is a bit more complicated but, fortunately, there is a small and useful app that we can use to remove any doubt.
How Widevine works
Widevine is produced by Google, which does not ask smartphone manufacturers to pay a license fee to integrate it into their devices. However, there are a number of technical requirements that must be met in order to obtain the Widevine certificate, especially in terms of the smartphone’s ability to handle encryption and video streaming. There are, for this, two types of Widevine certification: the L1 and the L3, with the former indicating the highest level of security and encryption possible.
Disney+ only with L1 certification
Walt Disney Company has announced that Disney+ will only work on smartphones with Widevine L1 certificate. As mentioned above, Netflix requires Widevine certification to work. To be precise, it settles for L3, but only for content broadcast in 720p resolution. For those in high resolution and 4K it requires mandatory Widevine L3 certification. That’s why it’s not certain that our smartphone can be used with Disney+, if we already use it with Netflix.
An app to get rid of the doubt
At this point, before subscribing to Disney+ it’s a good idea to check what kind of certification our device has. There’s a little Android app that does the job: it’s called DRM Info and it tells us all about our smartphone’s ability to manage DRM rights, including Widevine certification.