Unless there is a complete and unlikely turnaround, Euro 2024 will not be captured natively in Ultra HD. Instead, an “old-fashioned” Full HD capture, possibly coupled with a simple upscaling to 4K.
No native Ultra HD recording is on the agenda for Euro 2024. The message is clear, and it comes to us both from Tim Achberger (technical director of Sportcast, the company responsible for producing the matches of the Bundesliga) and Karl Petermichi (head of Austrian public broadcasting). Bad news relayed by the specialized site AVCesarwhich explains that the matches of the next Euro will only be captured natively in Full HD… and that we will have to be content, in the best case scenario, with upscaling to Ultra HD.
Unless there is a last-minute turnaround in the situation (very unlikely as it stands), we will therefore have to be content with a video recording of much lower quality than expected… And this, despite the false hopes given by Spanish television, a few weeks ago, following the 4K HDR Summit. At the end of the event held in Malaga, we learned that the Spanish channel RTVE would broadcast the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Ultra HD.
Mention was also made of an Ultra HD broadcast of the next European Championship. Ultimately, this will not happen, or simply through a upscaling.
No native 4K for the Euro, the reason would above all be economic
As pointed out AVCesar, this scaling, although disappointing compared to the prospect of native capture, could provide satisfactory image quality if the right encoders are used. It remains to be seen whether the different broadcasters will choose to offer an Ultra HD signal obtained by upscaling… and whether a convincing difference will really be visible compared to a “classic” 1080p broadcast.
Finally, note that the absence of native Ultra HD capture does not result (a priori) not from a problem or a technical constraint, but from UEFA arbitration of the different actors in the image chain. In this case, we learn that not enough channels and rights holders have requested native 4K recording, for cost reasons in a context of recession and economic tensions.
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