Dolby Vision came out in 2014, three years before HDR10+. The HDR10+ rival also offers more control over color through its support of 12-bit video. Combined, this has led to Dolby Vision enjoying wider adoption than HDR10+.
However, HDR10+ is still important for Netflix to offer to stay competitive with other streaming services supporting the format, like Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, Hulu, and Disney+, which announced in January that it would start supporting HDR10+.
HDR10+ is also important to HDR viewers who have devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. That includes TVs from Samsung, which sells more TVs than any other brand. People who try to watch HDR content on Netflix on an HDR TV that doesn’t support Dolby Vision have been streaming the lesser HDR10 base standard, which uses static metadata.
HDR has also grown in popularity since 2020, with HDR streaming increasing “by more than 300 percent” and the number of devices streaming Netflix and supporting HDR more than doubling, per Netflix’s blog.
Netflix adding HDR10+ support to its service at no extra cost is a welcome change from other streaming announcements, which often include price hikes, pulled content, and removed features. However, this latest move comes about three months after Netflix raised its Premium subscription price from $23 per month to $25 per month.
