By Andy Newham, head of sales, EMEA, Red Digital Cinema.
Like many major sports events, the 2025 UEFA Champions League Final was produced in 1080p50 HDR HLG. But not in 4K. This has been the subject of debate for a while with the future of UHD for live sport thrown into question. I’d argue that, in fact, the future of live sports broadcast relies on growing adoption of UHD.
UHD is not all about the ‘K’
The argument against UHD is that it’s too expensive to produce with no viable ROI. Viewers may have to pay a premium to watch a 4K broadcast yet for most people the difference is negligible. A display bigger than 55in Is needed to truly see the difference and even households that have this may not necessarily appreciate it or even remember to switch on the UHD. You can understand why people are looking to move away.
However, it is a mistake to conflate UHD with 4K alone. The UHD specification uses 10-bit colour space and supports high dynamic range (HDR) utilising formats like HDR10. This year there’s increased adoption of the cinematic look in conventional sport as rights holders including La Liga and the Premier League employ cinematic cameras for certain shots within the game to enhance the viewer’s experience.
Large sensors, richer colour, high dynamic range and shallow depth of field can deliver a really striking image on screen. The viewer is drawn into the experience, especially when focused on dramatic goal celebrations and reactions from the bench. None of this necessarily requires capture in 4K – hence UEFA’s choice of production format.
You don’t need 4K resolution to appreciate HDR and wider colour space on a TV – nor do you on an iPhone. We all know that more and more sports consumption is happening on social media but if you look more closely at what’s happening, you’ll find that sports fans prefer to watch content that has a more cinematic look. Rich colour and HDR translates extremely well to a smartphone.
The case for K
UHD has many facets and one of them is support for creating immersive media. If social media and most live broadcasts today have little need for 4K, revolutionary experiences demand 8K UHD.
Regarding immersive content production for venues with incredible displays (and wrap-around audio) like COSM in LA and Sphere in Las Vegas, these audiences can enjoy live sport in a more theatrical context. In order to deliver the substantive quality of viewing upgrade, shooting in 8K and with higher dynamic range and rich colour from large sensor cameras is required.
Virtual reality with headsets like Apple Vision Pro may not be to everyone’s taste but younger audiences are embracing them. Again, for immersive experiences to be effective, you need full UHD with cinematic depth rather than a simple, deep focus, flat picture. Don’t forget, cinematic depth of field is how our eyes work naturally: We focus on something in the foreground and the background naturally becomes blurred.
Cinematic cameras built for broadcast
As the cinematic approach and expanded uses for footage become the norm, cameras must be multifaceted. It’s not enough to provide the icing on the cake. They need to offer seamless integration into the rest of the broadcast infrastructure.
For example, the transition between strong depth of field and shallow depth of field is a very cinematic tool; one we see used in cinema all the time. In broadcast, shooting an entire game in shallow depth of field won’t work. The ability to dynamically transition between deep and shallow depth of field within the camera becomes especially important.
Lens choice is crucial; hybrid lenses that yield a classic sports look with a strong depth of field but also transition to the more cinematic look when the time is appropriate are critical.
There are other vital considerations. Cinematic cameras in a live broadcast environment need a very fast shutter speed to capture fast action without motion blur. Ease of colour matching between cameras is critical. Ideally, you want to take it further by integrating your cinematic cameras into Super Slo-Mo with technologies like EVS. Such flexibility is highly desirable because it allows you to use the camera in more ways than adding just a bit of polish onto the look of the game.
Sports like tennis, boxing and darts will benefit even more than soccer from a larger format camera where rich colour plus HDR and shallow depth of field are powerful storytelling tools for the game.
Fighting fragmentation with engagement
As a result, in 2026, we’ll see increasing numbers of cine-cameras being deployed as part of the regular camera plan and across a growing range of events – but it’s important to acknowledge a generational split. Younger viewers embrace the cine-look because it resembles EA Sports’ video games. However, the opposite can be true, and some viewers despise it for the same reason. While sensitive to this difference, in the evolution of sports broadcast, the primary target is a younger demographic.
Consumption of sport is in a difficult place right now because of the extreme fragmentation of rights. Fans are forced into subscribing to multiple platforms and services in order to follow their team or sport. That is not sustainable. Broadcasters and rights holders have an obligation to address this and not neglect their core fan base. It’s great to move forward with technology but we need to look at ways to make sports more accessible to viewers. Gating access behind paywalls is driving consumption onto social media.
Those consequences go beyond the financial. The entire experience of watching a full live match could evolve to shorter form highlights and clips. Such audience behaviour is already reflected in the cinema where attendance at theatres is declining in favour of consuming shorter form episodic content on streaming services.
Broadcasters today face the challenge of competing for eyeballs. With the push for condensed content – free and served up on-demand – they must create viable programming that delivers cinematic quality while serving multiple new audiences: gaming, social and immersive. UHD is a piece of that solution. As broadcasters compete there’s an opportunity for utilising the tools that enhance any coverage for any output to succeed.
