Author: John Archer / Source: Forbes
Following weeks of speculation/wishful thinking by technology journalists and football fans across the UK, the BBC has finally officially announced that it is going to be showing matches from the World Cup football tournament live in 4K UHD.
In fact, the BBC is going to be showing all 29 of its BBC One games in not just 4K, but also high dynamic range (HDR), using the broadcast-friendly HLG HDR format.
So viewers with compatible TVs can expect to see the BBC’s games appearing with a wider brightness range and richer colours, as well as four times HD levels of detail.
So far, so good. Where things start to get a bit complicated is in the way the 4K HDR games are going to be distributed. The BBC doesn’t have enough bandwidth to air the games via its terrestrial broadcast platform. And its platform neutrality rules have apparently prevented it from being able to distribute the games over cable or satellite, even though evidence on social media suggests that Sky was willing to carry the BBC’s 4K broadcasts for free.
What’s left, then, is the BBC iPlayer: the BBC’s on-demand video streaming service. The UHD streams will be available from the BBC iPlayer home screen as soon as the programme covering a match starts, and will stay visible until the trial for that game is… full.
Yes, that’s right: the 4K HDR World Cup match streams will only be available to a limited number of viewers, on a first come, first served basis. Yikes.
To be fair, while the BBC won’t put an exact number on how many 4K viewers the iPlayer will be able to support for its World Cup streams (which are still being classed as technology ‘trials’),…
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