Sinclair Adding HDR To Bally Sports RSNs

Sinclair Broadcast Group says it plans to offer high dynamic range (HDR) content for its Bally Sports Regional Sports Networks beginning in the third quarter of 2022. Premier demonstrations will be shown at the 2022 NAB Show (April 23-27 in Las Vegas).

Sinclair, working closely with its Bally Sports RSNs and technology vendors, says it has provided an “end-to-end” approach to “transition the sports industry to a more realistic and engaging viewing experience.” Leveraging “Advanced HDR by Technicolor,” high quality sports programming will be enhanced by intelligently extending the dynamic range (contrast) and increasing the color gamut to match more closely real-world experiences.

SL-HDR1, part of the ATSC NextGen TV standard, enables improved picture quality to be delivered to new consumer displays that support HDR. HDR video technology provides substantially brighter highlights, deeper shadow details, and brilliant colors. Employing a backward-compatible approach, SL-HDR1 enables content producers to deliver a single video stream to new and legacy display devices (TVs, tablets, phones, etc.).

As a result, newer devices will automatically render the more realistic HDR picture format while legacy displays will render the standard format (SDR). This allows for efficient bandwidth utilization, which is particularly important for over-the-air broadcasts.

Using this small suite of standardized technologies, Bally Sports game productions will provide an enhanced digital signal using HDR for all games, which will roll out over the second half of 2022.

Del Parks, Sinclair’s president of technology, said: “We recognize the need to bring better, more engaging content to our viewers across all platforms. This ‘no-compromise’ approach provides the highest quality viewing experience possible today, supplementing events captured in HDR. On the distribution side, it is the smart way to deliver SDR and HDR content efficiently in a single, universal transmission format.”