Dish, the nation’s second leading satellite TV service, has become the latest pay TV provider to announce it will offer Super Bowl 2020 in 4K.
The satcaster now joins Comcast, Verizon, DIRECTV, Altice (Optimum) and the live streaming service, fuboTV, in announcing that they will air the Super Bowl in 4K
Dish was expected to offer the game in the new picture format, but until Friday was saying publicly it had nothing to announce on the subject.
However, Dish last night posted a notice on its web site saying the game would be in 4K on channel 540. To watch the game on that channel, Dish subscribers will need a Hopper 3 receiver or a 4K Joey paired to a Hopper 3.
Fox has the broadcast rights to Super Bowl LIV, which will be played February 2, 2020 at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. The network plans to produce the event in 1080p and ‘upscale’ it to 4K via a stream on its Fox Sports apps which can be accessed on streaming devices such as Roku and Apple TV.
Upscaling is the process when one video format is converted to another. In this case, Fox will take the 1080p HDR signal and convert it to a 4K format. (This is what Fox did during the 2019 season with the 4K display of Thursday Night Football; the Thursday games were not produced in 4K, but they were upscaled to 4K.)
Upscaling 4K is not as good as what’s called, native 4K, which means the original event was produced in 4K, and broadcast or streamed in 4K as well. Still, the 4K broadcast should be an improvement over 1080i or 1080p HD.
Dish will likely be the last pay TV provider to announce it will show the Super Bowl in 4K. Other large pay TV providers such as Charter and U-verse have yet to add 4K programming to their lineups.
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— Phillip Swann
