The Super Bowl of HDR.
If there was a "Super Bowl" for pushing the bounds on live sports 4K HDR streaming technology, Super Bowl 54 with the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, was most definitely the winner. Besides being one of the year's most significant sporting events, the Super Bowl is known for featuring fantastical entertainment performances during the halftime show, while offering the perfect venue to showcase cutting edge technologies to a huge audience. This year's Super Bowl set a streaming record for the number of concurrents. Still, the highlight that was noted by many was the stunning HDR quality that was available across broadcast, Pay TV, and streaming service providers. In this episode, we speak with Michael Drazin, the HDR consultant, who worked with the Fox Sports team to ensure that the full HDR glass-to-glass experience was as good as it could be. If you are producing live sports video, you'll want to hear what Michael has to say about what the secret was to pull off this event, and what the future holds for HDR and live sports productions. Hint: once you've seen HDR, even high-resolution SDR pales in comparison. And if you are going to increase resolution, get ready to increase the frame-rate that you are producing in as well. i.e., 4K requires at least 60 FPS with 8K likely needing more than 60 FPS.