Hey, readers. Remember last week when I was complaining about How I Met Your Father and how dark it is? I don’t mean the dramatic tone, I mean it’s dimly lit. It turns out that sent me down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what the “real” problem is here. And I figured it out: it’s Hulu.
It turns out that “HDR” doesn’t stand for “Hulu Does it Right.”
HDR, as you’re no doubt aware, is a system that most new TVs have to let you see a wider range of colors. Done properly it’s supposed to make bright colors brighter and add life and definition to dark colors. In reality though, it tends to make everything on screen a little dimmer. Why? Most folks, myself included, watch TV in reasonably well-lit rooms. We set our TVs up so that the images look good in those rooms. However, most HDR TVs are calibrated to work well in dark rooms. This means that everything seems a little too dim in brightly lit rooms. If you watched any part of HBO’s House of the Dragon you probably had to turn off all the lights to see anything. HDR is the reason for that. Even if your TV doesn’t support it, the show itself was designed to work better in HDR.
HDR isn’t perfect. That’s why systems like Dolby Vision IQ came into being. Dolby Vision IQ takes the HDR experience and adds two things. First, it allows the TV to recalibrate on the fly, adjusting the picture so that nothing is too dark or light even on less expensive TVs. Second, it measures the light in the room and brightens up the picture to meet your expectations whenever it can. But Dolby Vision IQ isn’t available on every TV, and it’s not available on every streaming app. Hulu, for one, doesn’t use it. They use plain-Jane HDR. And then, they seem to make it worse.
Here’s what I did.
I was curious to see if my TV was to blame for How I Met Your Father looking so dark. So first, I turned off HDR. The show miraculously looked better. That didn’t surprise me. But then I tried a total of three different streaming devices, so that I had Apple TV, Google TV, and Roku all covered. With HDR on, all of them looked unacceptably dark on that show. Then I tried a different TV. In this case it was a Samsung TV, so that gave me another streaming ecosystem to try. Every time, the results were the same. This show was just too dark, unless I turned off HDR completely.
So then I wondered how bad things got. I tried other HDR content from Hulu. I immediately found Only Murders in the Building which wasn’t quite as bad, but still seemed overly dark. Other Hulu programs were the same: too dark in HDR. I did the same test with other streaming boxes and even the Samsung TV. Same thing.
Then, I tested HDR (not Dolby Vision) content from other sources. I tested HBO, Prime, Paramount+, Disney+, and even an Ultra HD Blu-ray I was able to get my hands on. Prime Video’s Hunters was a little dark, and so was their presentation of Rings of Power. But neither were as bad as anything on Hulu. Everything else looked great, including most of the content on HBO. I did test House of the Dragon on HBO Max and yes, it was super dark. But other HDR content on HBO looked really really good.
So to recap: Hulu looked bad on every TV. Nothing else looked as bad as Hulu, no matter which TV.
Hulu, what’s the deal?
I’m not sure exactly what’s up with Hulu. They don’t have any documentation on the way they implement HDR. But, I do know there are several different types of HDR, starting with the original “flavor” and going all the way to enhanced systems like Dolby Vision IQ. My guess, if I had to make one, is that Hulu is using a very early version of HDR when it tries to display its programming. It’s probably also using very simple, possibly outdated, ways of encoding HDR content to go on their servers. Since other apps’ HDR content is significantly better, I know that the problem could be fixed without anything else needing to be done on my end.
So the real question is, will Hulu step up and fix stuff on their end? I have to say I’m pretty pessimistic. The company themselves were pretty late to the 4K game in general. There still isn’t nearly enough 4K content on streaming and the content that exists isn’t always very impressive. But other companies have done a better job with their 4K and HDR content selections. Most support Dolby Vision which at least helps things look better by eliminating any problems caused by your TV.
What I don’t understand here is that Hulu is majority owned by Disney and Disney+ doesn’t have any of these problems. I wish I’d had a moment to try Andor when it was on Hulu. It wasn’t very bright on Disney+ but it wasn’t too dark to watch. I wonder what it would have looked like on Hulu.
Trying to be part of the solution…
It’s obvious at this point that streaming is the future of television. That’s not to say that antenna TV or traditional pay TV will go away, but streaming continues to grow and that’s no surprise to anyone. However, this is the sort of thing that will put viewers off an app and eventually drive them somewhere else. Hulu has been on the wrong side of history several times before, and if they can’t get their act together with their 4K and HDR presentations, I don’t know how they’ll compete in the future.
