World Cup In U H D ?

[sunny-dave]

Hoping to watch the world cup in UHD on your shiny new TV?

Don't get your hopes up - ITV are ignoring the UHD feed altogether and the BBC are only distributing it as a 'trial' through the iPlayer to a paltry number of users on an 'if you get lucky' basis.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/bbc-world-cup-4k-3478962

You'll need (as well as a lot of luck) an internet connection of (at least) 40mbps - which rules out almost everybody not on the Virgin network (unless you live right next to your green box and/or phone exchange).

Fortunately for me, I'm not that interested in the footie - but a lot of people will be spitting tacks about this - a lot of shiny UHD TVs have been sold on the back of the World Cup and now it looks like there will be no widely available feed in the UK.

It's a pathetic cop-out by our two national broadcasters - it's true that there is no bandwidth available on Freeview, but it would have cost them buttons to hire a dedicated (free) Sky channel so that anyone with a dish could enjoy the UHD feed - even poor old Eurosport managed to do that for the French Tennis (and very nice it looked too). I bet the BBC are going to do just this for Wimbledog.

I'm hoping that there is some 'brinkmanship' going on and that a widely available free satellite feed will be announced at the last minute - but nothing yet ...

[kvalidir]

Well that really is sucky :( Not a particular football fan myself but not the way forward is it?

[sunny-dave]

It's pretty poor, kval.

Sky have been broadcasting major sporting events(& many films) in UHD for well over a year now - and it looks fantastic.

I can't understand why the BBC & ITV have paid for the UHD feed from Russia & then aren't going to broadcast it (at least not in any useful way).