This is the first time the Super Bowl is streaming in 4K resolution, but it won't be true 4K

• Fox Sports announced in December that it will stream Super Bowl LIV in 4K resolution for the first time on media streamers like Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV.
• But there's a catch — it's not true 4K, it's upscaled 4K.
• Upscaling is when a lower-resolution video is artificially enhanced to a higher resolution. It often produces good results, but it's typically still not as good as a video that's natively produced at a higher resolution.
• Those who have watched previous Super Bowls on their 4K TVs may not even notice a difference, as most 4K TVs automatically upscale lower-resolution video to 4K.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Fox Sports announced back in December 2019 that the Super Bowl LIV will be the first Super Bowl to be streamed in 4K — a resolution sharper than traditional HD cable TV broadcasting — as well as high-dynamic-range (HDR).

The key word here is "streamed," as the Super Bowl in 4K will only be available while streaming from the Fox Sports app on streaming devices that support 4K streaming from Roku, Apple, and Amazon. The game won't be broadcast in 4K on traditional cable TV channels.

That's great news for any football fan who has dreamed of watching the Super Bowl in the utmost video quality.

Except, Super Bowl LIV won't actually be streamed in 4K resolution. The game itself will be produced in a more standard 1080p HD resolution, Fox Sports executives said during Sports Video Group (SVG) Summit in December 2019, and the video stream will be upscaled to 4K resolution. It's the same concept Fox Sports has used for its 4K Thursday Night Football streaming, where games produced in 1080p HD are upscaled to 4K resolution. 

That's to say the base video will be standard 1080p resolution, and it'll be artificially upscaled to 4K.

So, will the Super Bowl LIV look better than before?

Upscaling 1080p video to 4K resolution does produce a sharper image than standard 1080p video. But Super Bowl LIV won't necessarily look better than before, at least if you've already been watching the Super Bowl on a 4K TV.

Upscaling video from a lower resolution like 1080p to 4K is already something that most 4K TVs do. So, anyone who streamed regular 1080p Super Bowls in previous years on a 4K TV will likely already have watched games that were upscaled to 4K.

In turn, that's to say that Super Bowl LIV should technically look about the same on 4K TVs as it always has. One of the major differences is that the upscaling is being done by Fox Sports rather than your 4K TV. Whether Fox Sports' 4K upscaling is any better than your 4K TV's upscaling is unclear. Fox Sports has yet to respond to Business Insider's requests for clarification.

Why isn't Fox Sports simply streaming the game in true 4K?

"There are some real reasons why sports in general looks better in 1080p versus being shot natively in 4K," Fox Sports senior vice president of field and technical operations Michael Davies said at the SVG Summit. 

In 1080p resolution at the standard 60 frames-per-second that TVs usually play video, Davies said "if you're panning from left to right, the pixels won't blur quite as much...with 4K, you will get more motion blur in action scenes." 

With that in mind, streaming natively in true 4K resolution may not be the best option for the Super Bowl, at least until TVs that play video at higher frames-per-second become more ubiquitous. 

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