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Comment by artisinal | Hacker News Reader

The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.

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Supposedly the master stream from FIFA is in HDR, so if the colors are washed out its probably a bad conversion with your TV provider or TV.

I do agree its insane to me we're still not at 4K coverage for world major level sporting events.

The TV channel broadcast was 50Hz, 1080p and used image compression. They did not broadcast the master stream directly. That would have cost too much money.

It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.

So your local TV provider's limitations should limit the advertising for all TVs sold?

This actually made me look up some of the specs related to the feeds. Quite an interesting read. They apparently are delivering the main feeds in 2160p.

https://www.iseurope.org/news/fifa-world-cup-2026-broadcast-...

https://www.1001tvs.com/2026-fifa-world-cup-4k-hdr-broadcast...

It’s the national government channel broadcasting the matches in that quality, the local TV providers are just passing it on. Everyone in the country is watching at a low quality feed.

It looks great on youtube at 4k, at least if you are somewhere where they are transmitting it through youtube.

Video looks better on streaming platforms at higher resolutions, even when the pixels are just interpolated, because it increases the compressed bitrate.

i'm proud my country (italy) pionereed dct-based digital transmission during the 1990 world cup, i wish we lived in a present were europe was still ahead (or at least on par with) the rest of the world

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