What is genuinely produced in Ultra HD and what only carries the label, the four things on your own side that all have to be capable of it, and how to put a setting back if changing one makes the picture worse.
Ultra HD is not a single thing you buy. It is a result, and it only appears when several separate pieces of equipment in your own home all happen to be capable of it. Any one of them that is not will quietly cap the picture and tell you nothing. The useful part is that you can find out which of yours are capable in about ten minutes, this evening, without spending anything or asking anybody.
A channel is listed here as 4K when the broadcaster produced it that way. Upscaling, which means taking an HD picture and stretching it across a 4K panel, adds pixels without adding anything new to look at, and we do not relabel those as Ultra HD.
What you will not find is a 4K version of a channel that does not broadcast in 4K. A rolling news channel is a rolling news channel. Nobody can make it Ultra HD, and a provider claiming to has upscaled it and hoped you would not look closely.
| The part | Enough to work | Comfortable |
|---|---|---|
| Your line | 25 Mbps, held steady | 50 Mbps, over a cable |
| The box doing the decoding | Any 4K-capable box or television | Apple TV 4K, Formuler Z11, Shield TV or a Fire TV 4K Max |
| The player app | IPTV Smarters Pro | TiViMate, hardware decoding switched on |
| The screen | A 4K panel on an HDMI 2.0 socket | A 4K panel with HDR |
| The subscription | Any plan. 4K is not a tier and there is no upgrade to buy. | |
$ 15 25 35 49 for one month
the same as $15.00 a month the same as $25.00 a month the same as $35.00 a month the same as $49.00 a month
$ 29 49 65 99 for three months
the same as $9.67 a month the same as $16.33 a month the same as $21.67 a month the same as $33.00 a month
$ 45 75 99 149 for six months
the same as $7.50 a month the same as $12.50 a month the same as $16.50 a month the same as $24.83 a month
$ 69 119 159 239 for one year
the same as $5.75 a month the same as $9.92 a month the same as $13.25 a month the same as $19.92 a month
Each plan opens the same 25,000+ channels and the same 120,000+ films and box sets. You pay once, at the start. Nothing renews by itself, no card details are kept, and if you want the money back inside 7 days you ask and you get it. Every figure on this page is in USD.
Two of the settings on this page can make a picture worse rather than better, and both are undone in the same menu you changed them in. Force a player into hardware decoding on a box that handles it badly and the picture tears or goes green: set it back to software decoding and it returns to exactly what it was. Set a television box to output 4K to a panel that cannot take it and the screen goes black for about ten seconds, then falls back on its own. None of these menus reaches the account, so nothing you press in them can damage the subscription. If you would rather not work it out alone, send a photograph of the menu on WhatsApp and you will be told which line to change.
On a 55-inch screen or larger, at the distance most people sit from one, the difference on sport and on films is plain. On a tablet, a phone, or a small set in the kitchen, a good HD feed looks the same and costs about a quarter of the data. Each main channel is listed at 4K, HD and SD within a line or two of the others, so the choice is made per channel and per evening rather than once per plan. The decoder settings that stop a 4K feed stuttering are written out in our Firestick guide.
The free 24-hour trial opens the whole 4K category, with nothing held back for paying customers.
Around 25 Mbps held steadily for one stream, and nearer 50 Mbps if anybody else in the house is online at the same time. Steadiness counts for more than the headline figure. A line that measures 100 Mbps at lunchtime and drops to 18 Mbps every evening is a line that will fail every evening, whatever the speed test told you earlier in the day.
No. Every term, from one month to one year, opens the same 4K category. Term length changes what you pay per month. The tier changes how many screens can play at the same moment. Neither of them touches picture quality, and there is no premium version of the service to be upsold to later.
Open the display settings on the box itself and look at the output resolution it offers. If the highest option on the list is 1080p, you have your answer and it is the hardware, not the subscription. Older Fire TV Sticks and inexpensive Android boxes are the usual reason, and no provider can lift that ceiling from their end.
A 4K feed asks for three to four times the bandwidth of the HD version of the same channel, so it is the first thing to fail when anything is marginal. Try three things in this order. Switch the player to hardware decoding. Move the box onto an Ethernet cable. If the evening is a busy one, use the HD copy listed beside it, which is not a defeat: a steady HD picture on a Saturday night beats a 4K one that keeps stopping.
Not in a way that means anything yet. Almost nothing is filmed or broadcast at 8K, so a service advertising thousands of 8K channels has taken an HD picture, stretched it and printed a new label on it. A 4K feed carried at a high bitrate is the better thing to want, and it is what we send.
Three to four times as much. An hour of 4K is in the region of 10 GB where an hour of HD is nearer 3 GB. On an unlimited home connection that is of no consequence at all. On a capped line or a mobile hotspot it is the number to plan around, and it is one more reason the HD copies are listed right beside the 4K ones.
