One might say that the debut of the European football championships on Rai 4K was a flop. But no, technically it’s not like that, simply because a show that never aired can’t be a fiasco. But let’s go step by step and scroll through the episodes of this somewhat dramatic and slightly boring serial.
It starts with a bang: the first episode starts with the IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) website which reveals that the European Championships, contrary to what was announced, will no longer be produced in 4K but only in HD HDR.
DDAY is among the few newspapers to report this news. Some of the fans shed their first tears, while the rest of the world doesn’t care. Or he simply doesn’t know anything about it. Evidently, in the streaming era, the 4K of a live event is seen by broadcasters as something that generates costs and problems and few opportunities.
Second episode: the decision is made to go ahead and continue advertising the European Championship matches in 4K on Tivusat 210 (via satellite) and digital terrestrial 101 (via hbbTV streaming). In the end – they must have thought – who knows if it’s really 4K or not. The episode obviously ends out of focus.
Third episode: the days pass and we arrive at June 14th, debut of the European Championships with Germany-Scotland. A certain number of Italians stand in front of the screen to watch this match while waiting for Italy-Albania tomorrow. A small fraction of this total, if only because they spent a lot of money to buy a beautiful 4K HDR TV, decides to watch these European Championships and tries to go to Rai 4K, hoping for some nice images. The episode ends on a high note with the final lines of a TG1 that is certainly not exemplary in terms of video quality: the logo on the screen says 4K but we know that the TG is “upscaled”. End credits and desire to see what happens in the last episode of this tragic miniseries.
Fourth episode: the connection begins and suddenly the Rai 4K channel logo transforms into Rai 1 HD, as if by miracle.
And there are those who truly invoke a miracle: what divine enlightenment did the marketing men have who decided to advertise the event as 4K? A shot of intellectual honesty? A last minute repentance for fear of going to hell, like bad children? Or just a “paraculata” to keep up appearances?
The fact is that, as expected – those who thought otherwise were uninformed – the game is a rescaled HD, with certainly not exemplary quality. From what we have seen, the perception is better than what is being broadcast on Rai 1 HD, but probably more due to the demerits of Rai 1 than the merits of the fake 4K. It may be the night match, but the HDR (Native? Upsampling? Just a remapping curve?) never ceases to convince: unnecessarily contrasted images, with Germany’s white shirts far too bright (the players seem “lit up”, the HDR is not this) and the darks are too dark.
So much so that the images on Now are enough (we don’t have access to Sky Sport at the moment) to do better.
But even worse are the studio inserts: the TeleCucù talk shows are better lit, the guests have a collar of dry and defined head shadows on their shoulders and chest; and the bright forehead (the powder, this unknown). Yet in Saxa Rubra they are full of make-up artists, cinematographers and good lighting fixtures. The remote studio at the stadium, defined as a “splendid studio” by the journalist on video, is even worse: a nice spotlight shone in your face and off you go.
At sunset, against the light, a Rai executive somewhere in the world whispers: “After all, tomorrow is another day”. End credits and epic music.
Eight years wasted
Obviously this is just fiction, creative fantasies of the little author of this article for the benefit of his three readers.
What is true, in addition to Germany’s 5-1 (the only 5.1 of the match, given that the audio was not multi-channel), is that Rai, in the end, did the right thing. He stopped the spaceball: that is, he learned that you can not put the 4K logo on content that isn’t 4K. A mistake that he has already made many times in the past with repeated upscaling. Blaming Rai is looking at the finger pointing to the moon and not the moon.
The Rai 4K channel has never really taken off and for years – let’s say years – it has been a constant “startup” struggling with an Italian-style “experimentation”: that is, we can broadcast whatever it is, they are not regular broadcasts. And to think that the first event broadcast on Rai 4K (in true 4K, by the way) was the opening match of the 2016 European Championships.
We bring home three pieces of news:
1) Eight years have passed in vain and instead of moving forward, we have gone back. With TVs that in 2024 are a thousand times better than eight years ago. Bleah…
2) The mistake is not what was broadcast tonight, but the idea of those who thought that we could continue talking about 4K without having 4K images (which also don’t exist).
3) The lobby of TV producers is totally evanescent, the illustrious absentee of this whole affair. How can you propose 4K HDR super mini LED or even OLED televisions, with 77, 83 or even 100 inch screens, and not create the conditions so that there are adequate images, at least for the events that matter? Knock knock, is anyone there?
Enough, let’s stop the agony: turn off Rai 4K!
We never thought we’d get to say it: at this point, stop, this is therapeutic obstinacy. With a broken heart, at this point our hope is that the plug will be pulled on Rai 4k. Better to end it than still live this agony of promises and prospects that never come true. Even more so now that the rest of the world (read UEFA) is also against it.
And let the TV producers orphaned of 4K content make do: they have watched this channel be mistreated for 8 years without ever going to Viale Mazzini to ask for an account. Viale Mazzini which, however, is now asking Italians to accelerate the replacement of the TV fleet in order to switch to DVB-T2, without even making us understand if there will ever be continuous production in 4K. Is it necessary to invest to develop Rai 4K? And invest: we cannot just expect Italians to invest in a new TV which, in this way, will only be used by broadcasters.
To console ourselves, let’s “channel on”: the galaxies in 4K on Nasa TV UHD (211 on tivusat) cheer us up…
