While legions of fans loved the content of Game Of Thrones (well, up to its last season and a half, anyway), many became increasingly disenchanted with its picture quality. Viewers across the world regularly found themselves watching the battle for Westeros unfold through a mushy mess of MPEG compression noise and crushed, empty-looking dark scenes (unless they waited for the 4K Blu-ray release, anyway).
Thankfully House Of The Dragon maker HBO stated a few weeks back that its GOT prequel will be available on a number of platforms around the world in the 4K resolution and high dynamic range (which greatly expands the range of light you can see between the image’s darkest and brightest areas) picture technologies now supported by almost all of today’s TVs.
Further to this, though, we can now make British GOT fans happy with the news that UK subscription broadcaster Sky, which has exclusive first broadcast rights to the show in the UK, has just confirmed that it will be making the show available in both 4K resolution and high dynamic range.
The news has emerged from the SkyHelp Twitter account, in response to questions from an enthusiastic Sky subscriber. And before everyone rolls their eyes at the idea that any tech company’s Customer Services department might have any accurate information to share, the respondent involved in this case answered separately about the 4K and HDR features, having seemingly gone away with each query individually to seek confirmation from people in the know before responding.
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Since Sky’s Sky Q receivers and Sky Glass TVs don’t support Dolby Vision in the UK, Sky UK’s HDR support for House Of The Dragon will be limited to the more basic HDR10 system. It seems almost certain, too, given how Sky’s 4K and HDR support works, that the show will only be available in 4K HDR via Sky’s on-demand service, rather than with its live satellite broadcasts.
This latter point, though, won’t matter one bit to the vast majority of Sky subscribers – especially those now used to using the unique Sky Glass ‘live broadcast streaming’ TV approach – if the reward is a much more pristine way of watching HBO’s latest adventures in Westeros than we got with all eight grubby looking seasons of Game Of Thrones.
House Of The Dragon debuts on the Sky Atlantic channel on August 22, and if you don’t have a Sky broadcasting subscription you will also be able to access the show on the Sky-owned Now TV streaming service, which you can get for £9.99 a month. Note, though, that Now TV in the UK doesn’t currently support 4K.
