Good TV for watching sports, Discuss low stutter TV's

I feel the addition of channels on Apple TV and Amazon Prime could bridge this gap going ahead. These OTT platforms as they move from apps to channels, could substitute satellite service providers like Tata Sky eventually. For example, I can visualise Apple TV insisting on 60fps if Hotstar wants to come onboard as a channel. After all, they already have the hardware for it. Of course, true blue content providers such as Netflix and Hotstar will resist becoming channels till they can, but would eventually have to yield. The economics (and unified user experience) is bound to drive market consolidation in the form of channel-based OTT.

P.S. Can’t understand how Tata Sky remains so myopic when obsolescence is staring it in the eye. By now, given the Tata might, they could have gotten ahead in the OTT game leveraging its huge customer base had they responded to the changing consumption preferences in time. Of course they’d have had to rebrand it as it wouldn’t be any longer Tata ‘Sky’. :)
There is still time for that for DTH/Cable to die, do look at the LIVE option on fire TV for instance: Zee5 has to be synced almost every time and only shows news channels when it works, they say go use the in app menu for the rest channels that again are limited to 720p. Hotstar recently pulled out all news channels and unlike mobile you don't get the Live TV channels menu on the native TV app just Sports. Voot live channels, I find the audio quality pathetic as if it were intended. Airtel Xtream and other apps dont support live streaming on these platforms either. There is a hidden but evident play here, its been 3 years I've cut the cord but I bet you will find more live tv options on the mobile than for the TV, for which you have to rely on apps like OreoTV.
 
I subscribed to SonyLiv but found they have no settings as regard to sound etc. I was surprised that while SET HD telecasts in 5.1 channel sound, the SonyLiv does not. I believe till someone trolls them or some competitor ups on quality, they won't give a damn. Probably its time, we raised this issue, but on which forum?
 
I hope the cinema industry will move on from the draconian 24fps by then though.
Move onto what? Higher fps? How are you going to deliver higher fps content when most people don't have a product that can playback higher fps content?

To give you an example, Gemini Man was made (or shot) at 120fps. Forget streaming or even blu ray delivery. How many cinemas in the world can playback at native 120fps? <4!

When I read comments like TV's being "bad" for sports and whatever each one's idea is for stutter, I am just wondering, what are our expectations? Does "bad" mean unwatchable?

To start with, we are judging most of our TV's based primarily on streaming content. It is compressed data that your TV is presenting. There will be flaws. You cannot fault the TV here. It is presenting what you feed it, most of which is upscaled content. You cannot expect the TV to make a miracle out of it. Yes; there are a handful of TV's that use trick software that will process and smooth out an image, to reduce frame drops.

The only medium that can deliver the best possible image is Blu Ray disc. By this, I don't mean down loading a blu ray rip cause then most of us play it of some random software based player and that has its own problems with compression. You can achieve decent results with the use of a computer with a capable gpu card but again, you don't know how good the source is other than the claim that it is "blur ray".

Use a good reference uhd disc like Tenet. You will see a side to your TV that you never did. If your TV can't present this movie well, then you sure have a weak or not so good display.
 
Move onto what? Higher fps? How are you going to deliver higher fps content when most people don't have a product that can playback higher fps content?

To give you an example, Gemini Man was made (or shot) at 120fps. Forget streaming or even blu ray delivery. How many cinemas in the world can playback at native 120fps? <4!

When I read comments like TV's being "bad" for sports and whatever each one's idea is for stutter, I am just wondering, what are our expectations? Does "bad" mean unwatchable?

To start with, we are judging most of our TV's based primarily on streaming content. It is compressed data that your TV is presenting. There will be flaws. You cannot fault the TV here. It is presenting what you feed it, most of which is upscaled content. You cannot expect the TV to make a miracle out of it. Yes; there are a handful of TV's that use trick software that will process and smooth out an image, to reduce frame drops.

The only medium that can deliver the best possible image is Blu Ray disc. By this, I don't mean down loading a blu ray rip cause then most of us play it of some random software based player and that has its own problems with compression. You can achieve decent results with the use of a computer with a capable gpu card but again, you don't know how good the source is other than the claim that it is "blur ray".

Use a good reference uhd disc like Tenet. You will see a side to your TV that you never did. If your TV can't present this movie well, then you sure have a weak or not so good display.
No one is complaining about the 4k content on these high end tv's. They are excellent and exceed expectations.
The discussion is on how to improve the viewing experience for sports, a major segment of content consumed.
In India with t20 cricket matches going on for a minimum of 4 hrs and tests for 8 hrs per day , no other content can compete in duration.
Even football and tennis matches stretch for a minimum of 2 hrs.
One solution is " dont use oleds for sports". Obviously not acceptable.
2nd is wait for 4k or atleast 1080p transmission of sports - which can be a long wait.
3rd is to pressurize the content providers to transmit in 4k. This seems more doable as most of us have very good broadband connections and a 5 mbps bitrate gives a minimum acceptable picture.
4th is the tv manufacturers upscale better. And not only the very top end tv's. This is also doable but for present owners only a software solution is viable.
Or some sort of intermediate box , i am thinking if something like a firestick gives better performance than a inbuilt app , maybe a hardware solution can be envisaged.
 
I subscribed to SonyLiv but found they have no settings as regard to sound etc. I was surprised that while SET HD telecasts in 5.1 channel sound, the SonyLiv does not. I believe till someone trolls them or some competitor ups on quality, they won't give a damn. Probably its time, we raised this issue, but on which forum?
They don't care, I complained many times to Voot, Hotstar, Zee5 for the issues in OTT apps, when it comes to live channels,trust me they don't care as they know their main revenue is broadcast consumer here and they don't want to equate it yet. No etas are given and at some points they even deny the problem absolutely.
 
No one is complaining about the 4k content on these high end tv's. They are excellent and exceed expectations.
The discussion is on how to improve the viewing experience for sports, a major segment of content consumed.
In India with t20 cricket matches going on for a minimum of 4 hrs and tests for 8 hrs per day , no other content can compete in duration.
Even football and tennis matches stretch for a minimum of 2 hrs.
One solution is " dont use oleds for sports". Obviously not acceptable.
2nd is wait for 4k or atleast 1080p transmission of sports - which can be a long wait.
3rd is to pressurize the content providers to transmit in 4k. This seems more doable as most of us have very good broadband connections and a 5 mbps bitrate gives a minimum acceptable picture.
4th is the tv manufacturers upscale better. And not only the very top end tv's. This is also doable but for present owners only a software solution is viable.
Or some sort of intermediate box , i am thinking if something like a firestick gives better performance than a inbuilt app , maybe a hardware solution can be envisaged.
Ultimately it all comes down to revenue. Most of the cricket content is streamed on hotstar and /or Sony liv where I think the target audience is the one who watch these content through phones on the go and are not willing to shell out more for a premium experience.

These problems are not exclusive to OLEDS. Any modern TV with fast response time is going to have the same issues.

We obviously can build up pressure on the OTT to increase his quality but this will only work when there are enough numbers (I would like to think that we comprise of enough nos) who should also be amenable to fork out higher prices for the increased quality.

When the frames per second is less no amount of external hardware is going to change the quality.
 
Well, I just called up LG customer care earlier today and asked about the stutter issue wrt sports. They reply saying LG is NVidia GSync compatible TV which is best to handle stuttering and tearing and if this does not handle it seamlessly not many TVs in peer product lines can. Lightgamer, could you pls simplify what they mean and if they are right? (As I thought that pertains to only gaming and not for sports viewing)
 
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Well, I just called up LG customer care earlier today and asked about the stutter issue wrt sports. They reply saying LG is NVidia GSync compatible TV which is best to handle stuttering and tearing and if this does not handle it seamlessly not many TVs in peer product lines can. Lightgamer, could you pls simplify what they mean and if they are right? (As I thought that pertains to only gaming and not for sports viewing)
I played call of duty online yesterday through my ps4 and zero motion issues.
Very enjoyable infact. This tv lives up to its gaming credentials.
 
Until the Streaming industry comes up with a better protocol to handle 60 fps live material, I'm afraid TV is not at fault here.
 
Was checking out the highest quality over the air 4k movies available through the kaleidoscope system. It is uber expensive and it downloads the movie to your player and of course you get an experience akin to uhd blue rays.
 
There is still time for that for DTH/Cable to die,
+1

Indeed, they are adding more subscribers every day... Outside Metro/Tier-A cities, the Internet presence is still in its nascent stage. In a Price sensitive market like India, it's questionable how many will pay to subscribe to multiple OTT platforms. Unlike West, DTH/Cable is cheaper here than OTT.

 
Well if you subscribe to all the ott channels at their yearly cost lets say excluding netflix you get nearly all the channels and much cheaper price than cable/dth where hd and sports are the major money making channels. Further to get good ott content seamlessly we need high speed internet which may very soon be a reality with 5g. Major convinience of cable is the instantaneous change of channel which is still some time away in ott. Lets see how this plays out.
 
Well if you subscribe to all the ott channels at their yearly cost lets say excluding netflix you get nearly all the channels and much cheaper price than cable/dth where hd and sports are the major money making channels. Further to get good ott content seamlessly we need high speed internet which may very soon be a reality with 5g. Major convinience of cable is the instantaneous change of channel which is still some time away in ott. Lets see how this plays out.
its not easy to find channels ,content on apps ,where in traditional dth we changing channels less than 1sec
 
Well, I just called up LG customer care earlier today and asked about the stutter issue wrt sports. They reply saying LG is NVidia GSync compatible TV which is best to handle stuttering and tearing and if this does not handle it seamlessly not many TVs in peer product lines can. Lightgamer, could you pls simplify what they mean and if they are right? (As I thought that pertains to only gaming and not for sports viewing)
So there are two aspects to motion:

1. Motion for HFR content: High Frame Rate content requires low response times and minimal ghosting. For example, if you want to game at 120fps, 1 frame at 120fps will be rendered in 8ms. So the display needs to be at most 8ms in response time to display the motion properly. Else it will be a streaky, blurry mess.

Ideally you want this to be lower than that because input lag also comes into play. But that gets into complicated stuff with partial frame rendering, frame buffering and so on...

This will also apply to watching other high frame rate content, i.e. say 60fps sports stream or a 60fps YouTube video. Generally, sports is streamed at 50/60fps in other countries, so these kinds of displays are better for sports.

OLEDs are the best displays for these kinds of use cases. You can check this in rtings review as well.

2. Motion for LFR content: Movies/some TV shows are rendered at 23.976fps and generally tuned for displays with low response times/high motion blur.

In the case of such a video, a frame is rendered every 42ms or so. So if the display is too fast, it will appear as if the image changes instantly (sample and hold) and looks unnatural to the human eye.

This is where OLED does badly. Since the response time is so fast, it will look unnatural as the movie studios don't design for that.


Now coming to the hotstar saga: Hotstar shows cricket/other sports streams in 24fps. IMO, this is sacrilege and causes me headaches on my TV, my monitor and even phone(unless I view from >2 feet).

Hotstar's target audience for sports is people on smartphone/laptop without TVs. If you blow up that content on a big screen with fast response times, it will most definitely cause eye strain and headaches as you will realize how bad it is.

Tata Sky HD renders sports at 1080i 60 which is equivalent to 1080p 30. This looks noticeably better but still won't look great. If you have a chance, take a look at Sky cricket stream on their YouTube channel. The ones in 50fps look glorious.

Sports is fast paced and hence will inherently look bad at 24/30 fps. It's meant to be enjoyed in 60 or even 120fps streams. Same with gaming.

You can use the motion interpolation in your TV to make sports look a bit better. It also works significantly better with it. But again, it won't look remotely as good as native high frame rate stuff.

Motion is a complicated topic, but in general the better a panel is at response times, the more obvious the flaws of low frame rate content will appear.
 
Motion is a complicated topic, but in general the better a panel is at response times, the more obvious the flaws of low frame rate content will appear.
Hasn't the video to be De-Interlaced using a De-interlacer to display high-motion interlaced contents on natively progressive displays?
 
BTW, here's an example video of how cricket looks at 50fps. This is just highlights and not 60fps, but you'll feel how bad Hotstar is compared to that:
Hasn't the video to be De-Interlaced using a De-interlacer to display high-motion interlaced contents on natively progressive displays?
Modern TVs do de-interlacing quite well. Else you'd see the horizontal lines around edges like on the old-school recorded broadcasts. But yeah, ideally doing interlacing in hardware is better and that's why 1080p 30 is preferred over 1080i 60. But again, what choice do we have? Hotstar looks like 480p and even the 24 fps sometimes stutters and seems like 10fps when there's a high load on their servers.
 
May be its time for emulation for different usage. For Sports/Movies/Games instead of relying on same hardware/software.

Also its surprising how many channels/apps we should subscribe to? Discovery had good content on its HD, plus viewing on big tvs was pleasure, now they have Discovery+ App ... means you pay everywhere, and what do you get? At the most one or two shows specific followed by the same old stories.

Now I read there is YouTube Premium/TV (don't remember which one it was) ... for a whopping $60 monthly, dunno who pays and why?
 
Now I read there is YouTube Premium/TV (don't remember which one it was) ... for a whopping $60 monthly, dunno who pays and why?
It's cheap actually (comes as bundle of channels), traditional cable with similar offerings usually cost anywhere between 80-100$ in US.
 
BTW, here's an example video of how cricket looks at 50fps. This is just highlights and not 60fps, but you'll feel how bad Hotstar is compared to that:

Modern TVs do de-interlacing quite well. Else you'd see the horizontal lines around edges like on the old-school recorded broadcasts. But yeah, ideally doing interlacing in hardware is better and that's why 1080p 30 is preferred over 1080i 60. But again, what choice do we have? Hotstar looks like 480p and even the 24 fps sometimes stutters and seems like 10fps when there's a high load on their servers.
Better but still some of the fast panning shots at the start were not natural. Ample Jerkiness !. Could be individual sensitivity. But thats my perception. The colour depth and sharpness are very good though.
Watching on my phone i have become more conscious of the motion. Its not troubling on the phone due to the small image size which we miss while on a 65" incher the imperfections get blown up.
Changed my motion settings to natural yesterday for watching tennis on tatasky and the results were good. Lets see.
 
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