BBC iPlayer - Blue Planet II in 4K UHD

Wildlife fans can watch Blue Planet II in the best quality ever shown on the BBC from Sunday 10 December.
The full seven part series will be available on BBC iPlayer in Ultra HD and High Dynamic Range (HDR) – the first time the BBC has shown an episode or series in such high quality – on compatible TVs after the final episode airs on BBC One.

BBC iPlayer will also introduce a wider range of colours to the Ultra HD and HDR version. This means audiences can enjoy shades of colours never before seen in a BBC programme, bringing the spectacular animals, vibrant coral reefs and deep blue oceans of Blue Planet II to life like never before.

| more details …….. | MEDIACENTRE on BBC.CO.UK | 05-Dec-2017 @ 10:38 [

I find "quality" to be an oft misused word, particularly when used to describe definition: Sky, for example repeatedly advertise their UHD services are four times the quality ... they don't qualify the superlative with a comparison, but they equally don't give any indication as to their unit of "quality". What they mean to say is it has approximately four times more lines of picture depth than SDTV Sky Analogue offered.

So BBC UHD iPlayer's claim that it will be "the best quality ever shown on the BBC" is a difficult statement to compute. A 4K video could, of course, be transmitted at less than 1MB/s. The picture will be naff, but it'll be a 4K, and therefore the highest quality the BBC has ever broadcast.

But what do I know? I'm just a lonely pedant.

Given that the BBC HD iPlayer stuff is 720p50 at around 5.3Mbs - which is very much at the high-end of the scale for 720p streaming services, I suspect the Blue Planet II UHD HDR stuff will be similar in quality to Netflix's UHD HDR streaming levels (they have a couple of bitrates maxing out at around 15Mbs)

If it is anything like the UHD HDR Blu-ray of Planet Earth II, it will be well worth watching if you have an HDR TV that supports HDR iPlayer.

Surely they're advertising it as four times the number of pixels?

The new UHD equipped iPlayer profiles

Also available via Sky Q. Handy for those with Q and UHD sets without HDR/HLG.

2160p50 @ 22.7Mbps sounds rather yummy. Good to see the high end fallback will be nearly 16Mbps too.

Shame it's only stereo and not 5.1.

Possibly a good thing considering how drowned-out the narration was on the last-but-one episode. Up until then it had been fine.

Some digging seems to indicate that this presentation wont actually be 'from the iPlayer' it looks as if viewers will be linked out to a specific temporary 4K UHD distribution system. The standard iPlayer interfaces on valid devices still show the up to HD distribution profiles today.

Expect some rather clumsy interfacing if this is correct.

.... and it's live.

Looks amazing via SKY Q