Honestly, I thought it was just a problem with House of the Dragon. But, as I see more and more productions on HBO Max in 4K, I realize there’s a real problem on the satellite side. HBO’s SDR content is bad. Really bad. Unspeakably bad. And it’s not DIRECTV’s fault, I suspect.
What are you talking about?
By now most folks are at least aware of HDR. (If not, here’s a quick tutorial.) Chances are that if you have a TV made in the last three years, and it’s not a budget model, it has some sort of HDR support built in. It’s common to find it even in sub-$500 TVs now. HDR gives you the ability to see a more lifelike scene on your TV. Now, in many cases that means you see something duller than you’re used to, and that’s on purpose. But, at any rate it’s closer to the intention of the filmmaker. Or at least that’s what they say.
Unfortunately, if a program is produced in HDR and shown in SDR (which is, in other words, “not HDR,”) you’ll get a dark and blurry mess when you try to watch. A lot of people had their first of this problem with the Game of Thrones episode, “The Long Night.” At the time of its airing, there was no way to watch it in HDR, and that meant that unless you’d carefully calibrated your TV it was going to look incredibly dark.
The problem continued with HBO’s House of the Dragon, which many people (including myself) complained about. Even with a well-calibrated HDR TV, a lot of the episodes were so dark that they had to be viewed in a pitch-black room. But, at least we thought at the time that the real problem lay with producer Miguel Sapochnik’s choices, not with the channel itself. It turns out that wasn’t quite true.
Here’s the real problem
This is an actual, unretouched image from HBO’s The Last of Us on DIRECTV. Unfortunately I don’t have an HDR capture device so I can’t give you an unretouched version of the HDR version. So, what I did was take a picture of the screen with my phone. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good representation of what I saw on the screen.
I don’t think I even need to explain why one is better than the other. I mean, there’s so much more detail there, it’s ridiculous. And that, in two pictures, is why HBO needs to have a 4K HDR channel on DIRECTV.
Why is it so bad? Can’t they just tweak a few knobs or something?
Well, dear reader, yes they could tweak a few knobs. They could absolutely produce a version of the show for SDR viewing that looks better. In fact, you’re probably looking at this article on an SDR display and so the HDR content is being translated for you into SDR. So why doesn’t HBO do this? Honestly, I can’t tell you why because it doesn’t make any sense to me either. But what I will tell you is that I’m pretty sure that the image is already beat up by the time DIRECTV gets it. It’s pretty unlikely that DIRECTV is causing the problem themselves.
There are, in my mind, only two possibilities here. Either HBO is deliberately providing a dark and messy feed to DIRECTV, or they don’t realize they’re doing it. Chances are, it all looks great on some calibrated monitor in a control room and they don’t realize what regular folks are seeing. Either way, I’m here to clear that up. Now, if only I could clear up the picture problem.
What I really don’t understand is…
Discovery’s David Zaslav has spent the last six months or so absolutely gutting HBO Max. He canceled movies that were days away from release. He passed on award-winning shows, and he even took content off the app that Discovery itself owns. At the same time, he’s flooded the app with content from Discovery+ as if we need another place to see home renovation shows.
One of the reasons he did this, according to him, is that he wants to put the focus back on traditional pay-TV, where Discovery makes its money. Streaming may be the future, but according to Zaslav, it’s a money loser. He wants the world to forget all about that new-fangled internet and go back to good old TV. I like satellite TV myself, but I’m not giving up the internet. Sorry, David.
So if you’re supposedly all gung ho about traditional pay-TV, why would you have the quality be just so bleepin bad on one of your most-promoted shows? Why would you make it so that anyone who conceivably could watch over streaming, would? I genuinely don’t know.
Give us HBO in 4K HDR
DIRECTV has plenty of capacity on its satellites. It’s had 4K hardware for 7 years and live 4K programming for 6. HBO would be the perfect choice for a 4K national feed. There’s a decent amount of 4K content available already on HBO Max, and the channel could show upscaled HD when 4K wasn’t available. Chances are it would look better than the HD versions because of pro-quality upscaling.
For all I know, there are people talking about doing this right now. I’m sure it’s being held up by money concerns. Zaslav’s a money guy… I’m sure he wants to get more money from pay-TV companies. Pay TV companies on the other hand want to keep costs down because they don’t want to lose customers. But every so often, both sides can just do something that’s good for everyone. Maybe this could be one of those times?
All I know is that there’s going to be more high-end 4K programming coming on HBO, unless David Zaslav cancels that too. I’d like to watch it on satellite and keep my internet capacity free for other things. Come on, DIRECTV… give me that option. Please?
