The latest TV tech comes to Super Bowl 2020 (The Daily Charge, 1/28/2020)

The Super Bowl is coming this Sunday, Sunday Sunday. So let's run down the best advice for watching the game. Stick around for your Daily Charge. [MUSIC] Good morning, and welcome to the Daily Charge. It's Tuesday January 28. On Ben Fox Rubin And I'm David Katz Meyer, And let's talk TVs. [MUSIC] Okay, David, let's start off discussing what's new with this year's broadcast. It's all about 4k, 4k, 4k 4k. So Fox, which has a Super Bowl this year has been doing 4k broadcast for the Thursday night broadcast for a little while. This is going to be the first time ever that the actual Super Bowl is in 4k with HDR high dynamic range. So you should be able to see a real improving picture quality if you do the 4k stream. They never did 4k before? No. So the Super Bowl? Nope. CBS and NBC had it the last couple years they did stream it and it was totally free. But this is the first time it's in 4k HDR streaming as well as regular streaming. So what are some of the pit falls for doing 4k. Well- This sounds like it might go badly. Horribly wrong. Yeah. Well we'll see I mean again streaming is a mature technology. People doing it in 4k for a long time. Netflix, Amazon, these guys have no issues with it. But it's the Super Bowl and there's millions of people watching now. I think CBS last year said they had around you know, two and a half million people streaming NBC was like 2 million before that fox might get up to 5 million this year just because of the acceleration of cord cutting and everything like that. What we, I don't expect it to be a major issue around the country, all these people streaming at the same time, losing their connection because too many people are streaming. I think they figured that out, to a large extent. We talked to somebody at Akamai earlier today, actually, about All the logistics and stuff that goes into it. So I think they're pretty solid there. But you know, you got to have the right material, you gotta have the right stuff and at home, you got to have enough bandwidth, you know, to be able to handle it. So one other aspect that's important to talk about is is that this isn't native 4k or it's not being shot in 4k, Right. It's being up converted. Yeah, This kind of feels like we're we're I don't know being sold a bill of goods or something or tell me maybe it isn't so bad. There are a couple things here. So, yes, it is the cameras in the stadium are 10DP60. The production equipment and the trucks tennety P60, which is HD with 60 frames per second. So nice and fast for sports but still HD, not 4K. To get to 4K you need four times that much resolution, so they just don't have the equipment there at the front end yet. But, they are converting it, and Fox is doing the conversion. They're changing it to 4K, they're adding high Dynamic range. They're using you know some pretty sophisticated equipment to do that it's going to probably be better than for example, your TV converting stuff to 4K HDR or for example an Apple TV can do a fake HDR conversion to, I think it'll look better than that. And so you're going to get a you know, a sharper picture. One of the differences is that Fox is normal broadcast is HD broadcast going out over the air going out to cable going out to Service provides like YouTube. That's gonna be in 720p60 because that's Fox's HD broadcast. So, their actual 1080p60 thing is gonna look better, the 4K stream is gonna look better just by [UNKNOWN] 1080p instead of 720p. So, if I wanna watch the 4K stream, it's only availabe on this Fox Sports app, correct? Correct. So, If I'm using a digital antenna, if I'm doing I don't know some other thing where I'm using a cable box, it's not going to be available that way That's right. The only way to get 4k the stream, the only way is to stream it and you got to stream it with the Fox Sports app. The cool part is it's free Okay So install the Fox Sports app on your Roku, Amazon Fire. Fire your Apple TV. You'll be live streaming in 4k HDR actually, the Apple TV is a strange exception. They're not doing an HDR but they are doing a 4k of course they are. Yeah, so apple. Yeah, why not gotta have a little exception there. But anyway, all those devices and those are pretty Pretty good. They started like 40 bucks for one of these 4k streaming sticks if you want to add it to your 4k TV, want to make sure that you get the app. It's the Fox Sports app Not to be confused with the Fox Sports Go app. Yes. Yeah. No. God forbid they have a separate app name. Anywhere on that app, you're not going to have to sign in, you're not going to have to pay any money. You just literally download the app, you can start watching that 4k stream once the Superbowl starts, okay, so somebody that's on the market that's interested in buying a ticket. Usually this is the time of the year that you know people look to upgrade their TVs. Going to have some people over what are some general rules of the road with some general advice if you're looking to buy a TV in the next couple days for the game specifically. So it this is the best time of the year to buy a TV in terms of prices except for Black Friday. So Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Those were the prices were at their lowest for any of these TVs there on the market now. This is the time when all those prices go right back down to the best price of the year most of CDs we've seen are at their black friday prices for our favorite televisions. So you can get a 65 inch TV our favorite Roku TV for 800 bucks for a 65 inch OLED TVs are down to 1800 for the 65 inch you know the best TVs on the market Let's stop so you know the prices are right there for you know through the Superbowl you know they're clearing out inventory for the 2019 TVs and advance of all the 2020 TVs that we saw, it's a yes. Okay, and if you decide that you don't wanna buy a TV for whatever reason now, you wanna wait for some new tech coming out. Maybe in the next couple of months is Like would you be missing out on anything. What are you waiting for. Yeah, like if you buy now, is there something even better gonna come down the road in 3 months, 6 months, what have you. No. So at CES. Just a pretty [CROSSTALK] confirmation. Sorry I'll take a step back like streaming TVs are mature technology. So at 2019 TV has pretty much all the must have features that any of the 2020 TVs have. There's a couple things around the edges some support more voice support. For example, Vizio is adding voice on the remote. You can do some things, you know with with the the gaming modes that are available on the 2020 TVs that aren't on the 29 teens. But for the most part for pretty much everybody out there, the 2022 TVs are perfectly good. And you know, they're they're at their lowest prices so you're not going to see the same types of prices now until next November basically. So if you're in any way thinking about buying a TV. Now's a great time and you know, again, you're not going to get a huge improvement with those 2020 models. Yeah, there's no like version of 5G for No. Yes. A good point.>> Yeah, there's like waiting for, you know, something like that. The last thing that I wanted to get to was CES. Uh-huh. So as far as TV technology was CES. What was your expectation was a kind of a snooze this year where they're really exciting things. The thing that I thought was really interesting was the LG rollable TV which obviously had been presented in previous years, but now they had a price to it. So tell me what you saw. Yeah so that was a really cool product last year at CES and again this year in January so that's a OLD TV Best Picture technology out there. It literally rolls up and and rolls back down into this little box and disappears completely because OLD it is flexible. Allows curved screens and in this case a screen that rolls up like a kind of like a lampshade basically inside this little box. That's really cool and you can anticipate this thing being super useful in the future. If they make it mass market and commercialize it and get the price down. Unfortunately, it's 60 grand. So $60,000 165 inch TV That price isn't confirmed. But you know, I heard that from an LG higher up in Korea. So anyway I it'll be in that range and at the end of the day, that's what 30 Normal 65 inch OLED TVs or something like that. So it's, it's really it's really, really expensive. That's the kind of stuff you see at CES these Newfangled TV technologies another example from LG competitor is Samsung. They have something called micro LED. And the TV that they showed again at CES this year was called the wall. And micro LED is amazing. It's like the same technology in in scoreboards, for example, but it's shrunk down tiny little LED, super bright Picture can be amazing, and the wall is huge. 292 inches is the one they showed there which is like, just vast, you know, and you can maybe imagine this thing getting smaller, getting more living room friendly. But that thing is multi hundreds of thousands of dollars now. So Wow these things are not gonna be on the floor at BestBuy anytime soon.>> So what about AK that was something that at least I saw at Samsung's booth. That's like the whole thing that they were pushing. I think they even had an AK Lounge is that something customers should be paying attention to at all? No. Again this year, AK is gonna get less expensive this year but AK is not this isn't the year of 8k becoming mainstream now. In the future, a couple years down the road, it's totally feasible to see 8k TVs costing the same as 4k TVs and you know, there being a lot more options out there on the market for people. But this year, it's you know, they're gonna Gonna be slightly less expensive, but it's not going to be worth it for most people, especially because there's no AK content out there right now. I mean, there's really nothing there's a couple of YouTube videos that are an AK. But aside from that, there's there's no broadcast, no TV, no movies, in AK, and there's been no announcements of them, because we talked about streaming in the beginning. It takes a lot of bandwidth to get, you know, four times the bandwidth to do. 8K. So if you're talking megabits per second, it's like 15 for 4K, 45 for 8K. So, that's a big difference. And it's one of these things where it's gonna be a few years down the road, yeah. For the Daily Charge, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. And I'm David Caspar. Thanks, everybody for joining us. [MUSIC]