UK pay-television broadcaster BT Sport showed the first live 8K ultra-high-definition sports broadcast in the country on Thursday with its coverage of the Arsenal v Olympiacos Uefa Europa League match.
BT partnered with electronics company Samsung for the round-of-32 match, which took place at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.
They used a bespoke BT Sport 8K outside broadcast set-up, which was delivered to Samsung QLED 8K TVs.
BT holds the broadcast rights in the UK to Uefa’s club competitions for the 2018-21 cycle and renewed these rights for the 2021-24 cycle in November. The latter agreement is worth £400m (€461m/$506m) per season, which is slightly up on BT’s £394m per-season outlay for the current cycle.
The telco trialled its 8K live broadcast technology last year when it showed an hour-long broadcast of the Premiership Rugby 7s tournament at the IBC convention in Amsterdam.