It’s obviously very difficult to work out without the box - however, in terms of narrowing it down… surely 4K coverage can only apply to games produced by Fox Sports; ie. Channel 7 aren’t going to be offering Foxtel a 4K feed for their own games, even if it were technically possible (because that’d make no economic sense to them)?
That’d cut down the possible matches to five each week - which this week, is basically the Saturday and Sunday matches except for the Saturday night game which is Seven. There’d be little to no chance of getting the Wed/Thu/Fri games in 4K.
Given Foxtel’s boast of 35 games over nine rounds… on the average, likely four of those would be in 4K - you’d just love to know which ones, and that’s the pain of it.
I guess it also shows that having to share between the two ends up with compromises. You just won’t see the biggest games in 4K, unless say 7plus starts offering a premium 4K stream (which seems much more likely than ever seeing 4K on terrestrial TV). But it’s a lot, lot better than nothing, and Foxtel have other things to show that off, like the F1 where they can show the 4K footage from Sky UK - that’d be something to behold I imagine.
Similar case, I’d imagine incidentally, for the three games covered by Nine for the NRL (I guess, also Warriors games in NZ depending on Sky NZ’s capabilities, though that’s not this year). I wonder if the fact they were only expecting three games a week on average (out of five) might have to do with facilities at suburban grounds, or some games also being taken to regional venues in the first ten rounds that they made that claim.
I don’t know how many 4K OB trucks are available but there would probably be logistics to consider in getting them from one venue to the next, depending on where the non 7 and 9 AFL/NRL games are on at and how much time they have vs need to move it.
AFL games in 4K have appeared on the show page, all games on UHD 2
Round 1
Geelong vs Essendon
Hawthorn vs North Melbourne
West Coast vs Gold Coast
Round 2
Essendon vs Brisbane
North Melbourne vs West Coast (now confirmed after no live broadcast was scheduled initially, see below)
Fremantle vs St Kilda
(The first showing of North Melbourne vs West Coast shown was a repeat at 12:55am Monday morning on Fox Footy in HD, wouldn’t be surprised if that’s also in UHD since the game the day before at Marvel is. Same could be said about GWS v Syndey with the NRL game the next day though.)
NRL Round 3 (on UHD 1)
West Tigers v Warriors
Raiders v Titans
Sea Eagles v Bulldogs
I’m on IQ5 IP only. Before today the 4K channels were approximately 17 seconds behind the HD channels. Today, for the Sharks V Knights game at least (and I’ll check AFL Adelaide V Port Adelaide later) the 4K channel is approx 0.5 sec ahead of HD.
HD streaming delay hasn’t changed (still roughly in line with official AFL and NRL website radio streaming) so it looks like the 4K encoding has been improved.
Update: Yep, 503HD and 592UHD roughly in line for the AFL.
I thought this might be of interest. The bandwidth usage graph out of my router while I had the IQ5 running the various IP versions of Fox Footy this afternoon.
The IQ5 is running over Ethernet to my router which connects to NBN via FTTN. Test was conducted with other devices not using data. Wi-Fi is very congested where I live so anything which can be wired, is wired, especially anything which would be impacted by excessive buffering.
No buffering issues. One particularly good thing about the 4K channels is Foxtel don’t encode a lower quality stream of them so the box doesn’t spend a second or too getting up to full quality like it does with the HD channels.
The IQ5 occasionally randomly decides I’m not authorised for a channel while I’m watching it and cuts it off, but a quick change of channel and change back fixes that. But that’s for all channels, not just UHD.
I’m with Aussie Broadband so I’m outside the Telstra/Foxtel network and it doesn’t seem to cause any issues.
