Things are about to look a lot better for sport fans with Sky Q as the company prepares to make 4K HDR a possibility for both the Olympics on EuroSport and Premier League coverage on Sky Sports Football. The company is promising 200 hours of Olympic coverage via EuroSport in UHD and HDR.
Interestingly, the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics from Tokyo won’t be in 4K or HDR this year T3 has confirmed with the broadcaster. That's down to considerable production challenges arising from the pandemic . Usually the company would send a large team to cover the event, but this year content will only be available in HD because everything is being managed from the UK, not Japan. It’s a blow, given how good the corporation’s coverage of Euro 2020 looked just a few weeks ago. Sky’s US owner Comcast has faced similar challenges, and is also forgoing pure UHD coverage this year in favour of a selection of upscaled content, according to the IBC.
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There are some catches, because some Sky Q owners may still have the earlier generation of boxes which do not support high dynamic range. Sky has a guide to which hardware is compatible on its website. You will also need a subscription that supports 4K and, of course, a TV that can handle Hybrid Log Gamma HDR. If you aren’t able to get HDR, you will still be able to see both the Olympics and live football in 4K.
HDR Football will start with Brentford vs. Arsenal on Friday 13 August. You’ll need to hit the red button when watching Sky Sports to access the HDR version of the match. Sky hasn’t released details of exactly which games will be available in the format, so it’s possible it will be broadcasting all of its matches in the format.
There’s plenty of other HDR content on Sky’s service too. On-demand movies and TV shows are available and customers accessing Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+ on their devices can also take advantage of high dynamic range too.
