Rich and Vibrant Colors

HDR10+ is supported across major streaming platforms:

• Amazon Prime Video — All HDR-enabled content carries HDR10+ metadata. B.A. Winston, VP Amazon Prime Video: “All of Prime Video’s HDR-enabled content has HDR10+ capability and metadata.”
• Netflix — Available on AV1-encoded content, with ongoing expansion.
• Apple TV+ — Apple TV+ original series and films, as well as selected iTunes movie rentals and purchases.
• YouTube — Preserves HDR10+ metadata that is uploaded with content (e.g. from mobile phones or content producers).
• Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+ — Also support HDR10+ content delivery.

Supported streaming devices include: Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Amazon Fire TV Cube (3rd Gen), Roku players, Chromecast with Google TV, Walmart ONN 4K streaming devices, and TiVo.

Because HDR10+ carries no per-title licensing requirement for content providers, services can add HDR10+ support to their existing libraries without additional commercial negotiations — which is why the format continues to expand across platforms.

Amazon Prime Video has been an HDR10+ streaming platform since December 2017 — the first streaming service in the world to deliver HDR10+ content to subscribers. The scale of that commitment is total: “All of Prime Video’s HDR-enabled content has HDR10+ capability and metadata,” said B.A. Winston, Vice President of Technology, Amazon Prime Video.

In 2026, Prime Video extended that commitment further by becoming the first streaming service to launch HDR10+ ADVANCED — delivering Enhanced Overall Brightness and Intelligent Motion Smoothing to subscribers on supported Samsung displays. HDR10+ ADVANCED content is available through the Prime Video app for both ad-supported and premium subscribers globally.

The combination of the world’s largest HDR10+ streaming library and the first HDR10+ ADVANCED deployment makes Prime Video the flagship reference platform for HDR10+ content delivery.

Netflix has chosen to deliver its HDR10+ streams using the AV1 video codec, an efficient open-source format. Because of this, watching Netflix content in HDR10+ requires a device with AV1 decoding capability, typically TVs and streaming players made from around 2020 onward that include dedicated AV1 hardware. Devices without AV1 support will play the same Netflix content in standard HDR10, which still delivers a high-quality picture.

This is a delivery infrastructure decision Netflix made for its own platform; it is not a requirement of the HDR10+ standard itself. Other streaming services that support HDR10+ use different codecs and do not have this hardware constraint.

If you are unsure whether your TV or streaming device supports AV1, check the manufacturer’s specifications or the streaming platform’s device compatibility page.

HDR10+ is an open standard. The HDR10+ certification and logo program — administered by HDR10+ Technologies, LLC — operates on a royalty-free basis. There are no per-device or per-unit royalties payable to the LLC for certification or use of the HDR10+ certification marks.

Companies that join as Adopters receive access to the technical specification, the HDR10+ patent pool, and the right to use the certification marks. Each Adopter is responsible for developing or acquiring their own implementation of the standard — the LLC provides the specification and certification framework, not a mandated implementation. This keeps the ecosystem open: manufacturers can build their own implementations or choose from commercially available options, and competition among implementations drives quality and innovation.

The result is a standard that any qualified company can adopt and certify products against, without owing royalties to a central licensor on every unit sold.

HDR10+ is designed with a specific purpose: to reproduce the creative intent of a colorist’s HDR grade as faithfully as possible on certified HDR10+ displays. The metadata is not a substitute for the creative work;  it is derived directly from it, carrying the colorist’s mastering decisions to the display.

The way HDR10+ achieves this matters. The metadata includes a statistical analysis of each scene’s luminance characteristics, which the display uses to map the content’s dynamic range onto its own certified capability. This preserves the tonal relationships that define the creative look, the shadow detail, midtone character, and highlight roll-off the colorist intended, scaled appropriately for each display. HDR10+ is not an interpolation between HDR and standard video, and it is not designed to downconvert content. It is an HDR-to-HDR process that adapts to what each certified display can deliver.

Certified HDR10+ displays must meet defined performance standards to ensure faithful reproduction is possible across the ecosystem — which is why the certification mark is a meaningful signal of picture quality capability, not just format compatibility.

The metadata generation process is designed to be automatic precisely so that the colorist can focus on the grade itself — not on a separate HDR10+ metadata session. The standard captures the creative work as it happens. For productions requiring additional control, HDR10+ ADVANCED extends the metadata with scene-level motion and brightness signals that certified displays act on directly.

HDR10+ is built as an open standard, which has practical consequences for everyone in the content and hardware supply chain.

For content providers and streaming services, HDR10+ requires no per-title licensing agreements or content approval process with a third party. A studio or streamer can encode and deliver HDR10+ content without negotiating separate commercial terms; the standard is accessible to any production team using compatible tools. HDR10+ metadata generation is also designed to be fully automatic, derived directly from the mastering process;  no separate manual metadata pass is required.

For device manufacturers, there are no per-device royalties payable to HDR10+ Technologies, LLC. Manufacturers choose their own implementation approach, which keeps engineering decisions competitive and flexible. The result is broad deployment: HDR10+ appears in the majority of televisions and smartphones sold worldwide, including every Samsung TV,  the world’s leading TV brand by volume.

For viewers, this breadth matters. A format available on the world’s most widely sold displays, across major streaming platforms, and in free over-the-air broadcasts reaches more screens without requiring consumers to make format-specific purchasing decisions.

HDR10+ maintains a formal certification program that independently verifies devices meet the standard’s requirements before they can carry the HDR10+ certification mark. Certification is conducted at HDR10+ Authorized Test Centers — independent labs running standardized test procedures against published test specifications.

For consumers, certification means the HDR10+ logo on a device is a verified claim, not a self-declaration. A certified display has been independently confirmed to correctly process HDR10+ metadata, track luminance accurately, and reproduce the D65 white point — the international standard for HDR color reference.

For HDR10+ GAMING, both the display and the source device — such as a graphics processor — must be independently certified.

For the ecosystem, certification creates a quality floor. The open nature of HDR10+ means any manufacturer can adopt it, and certification is what ensures that openness doesn’t come at the cost of consistency. Over 22,000+ certified products across 11 categories carry the mark today.

The full list of certified products is searchable at hdr10plus.org/certified-products.

Yes. HDR10+ is one of the most widely deployed mobile HDR standards globally, appearing in over 75% of the global smartphone market.

Mobile is one of the eleven product categories in the HDR10+ certification program, alongside televisions, streaming devices, computer monitors, projectors, and more. Certified mobile devices are tested for accurate HDR10+ tone mapping across a range of display types, from flagship OLED panels to mid-range LCD displays.

The full list of certified mobile devices is at hdr10plus.org/certified-products/

Reference: 75% smartphone figure sourced from HDR10+ Ecosystem Whitepaper (December 2025)

Yes. HDR10+ is approved for ATSC 3.0, the NextGen TV broadcast standard, enabling HDR10+ delivery over free over-the-air television alongside streaming and physical media.

Active HDR10+ broadcasts are already live across at least 40 US markets, led notably by NBC 4 New York and Gray Television. As NextGen TV infrastructure continues to expand — now reaching more than three-quarters of US households — HDR10+ broadcast coverage is growing alongside it.

This makes HDR10+ one of the few HDR formats deployed across streaming, physical media (UHD Blu-ray), free over-the-air broadcast, mobile, gaming, and automotive platforms simultaneously.

HDR10+ ADAPTIVE is an extension of HDR10+ that adjusts tone mapping in real time based on the ambient light conditions in the viewing environment. A certified display uses a built-in light sensor to measure room brightness and continuously adapt the picture,  preserving shadow detail and highlight accuracy, whether you are watching in a darkened home theatre or a brightly lit living room.

HDR10+ ADAPTIVE is broadly supported across the certified device ecosystem, with more than 6,300 certified products available from a wide range of manufacturers. The full list of certified HDR10+ ADAPTIVE displays is available at hdr10plus.org/certified-products.

HDR Dual Carry allows a single video stream to simultaneously carry the dynamic metadata for two HDR formats, SMPTE ST 2094-40 (HDR10+) and SMPTE ST 2094-10, embedded as separate SEI messages within the same encode. It is currently used with HEVC for ATSC 3.0 broadcasting and OTT streaming.

The practical benefit for broadcasters and distributors is significant: rather than maintaining two separate encodes to serve different HDR-capable devices, a single Dual Carry stream delivers the correct HDR experience to each device automatically. Each display reads the metadata track it supports and ignores the other, with no compromise to either signal.

Gray Television’s ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are a real-world example of Dual Carry in operation, simultaneously delivering both dynamic HDR standards to viewers across 40+ US markets from a single broadcast stream.

The Spears & Munsil Ultra HD HDR Benchmark (2023 Edition) is a three-disc 4K Blu-ray test set created by video calibration experts Stacey Spears and Don Munsil. The disc encodes the same source footage simultaneously in HDR10+, HDR10, and [multiple HDR formats],  all mastered at 10,000 nits, making it the definitive tool for comparing HDR format rendering on the same display with identical source material.

A key test scene features horses in a snowstorm. On a display with poor tone mapping, snow clips to pure white, losing all texture. On a display with accurate HDR10+ implementation, the scene reveals natural snow texture and horse coat detail,  exactly as the colorist intended.

Because the same scene is encoded in all three formats on one disc, the benchmark allows direct, side-by-side format comparison under controlled conditions.

Available for $59.95 at spearsandmunsil.com/uhd-hdr-benchmark-2023/

HDR10+ GAMING optimizes HDR display settings dynamically for video games, enhancing overall visibility and more immersive game playing. HDR10+ ADAPTIVE adjusts content based on ambient lighting conditions, ensuring optimal contrast and detail in both dark rooms and bright environments for a consistent viewing experience.

HDR10+ is one of the most widely deployed HDR standards in consumer electronics:

• 180+ adopter companies across content, display, source, SoC, and tool categories
• 22,000+ certified products across 11 product categories
• Brands supporting HDR10+ represent nearly 80% of televisions sold worldwide
• Brands supporting HDR10+ represent over 75% of the global smartphone market

Certified products span: televisions, mobile phones, streaming devices, OTT devices, computer monitors, projectors, Blu-ray players, GPUs, automotive displays, in-flight entertainment systems, and audio/video receivers.

Full lists: hdr10plus.org/adopters/ and hdr10plus.org/certified-products/

Reference: 80% and 75% figures are sourced from the HDR10+ Ecosystem Whitepaper (December 2025).

HDR10+ metadata can be generated during post-production mastering, live productions, or transcoding for distribution on formats like UHD Blu-ray, OTT streaming, and broadcast television, using tools and encoders that are available for both professional and mobile workflows. Since HDR10+ metadata creation is automatic, it is extremely cost-effective to simply generate at encode time, and there is no need to pre-compute, store, or archive the data.

Yes, HDR10+ is fully backward compatible with HDR10, the base HDR format.

Although devices that only support HDR10 can play HDR10+ content, they can only use the static metadata portion without any dynamic enhancements. It is effortless for HDR services to adopt HDR10+ as existing HDR10+ content does not need to be reencoded. HDR10+ metadata can simply be calculated and injected into existing compressed streams without going back to source or mezzanine content!

HDR10 uses static metadata, meaning a single tone mapping curve is applied to the entire video program. This “one-size-fits-all” approach is unable to adapt to variations in scene brightness—such as a dark night followed by a bright explosion—leading to crushed shadows or blown-out highlights on many displays.

No. Neither HDR10+ nor HDR10+ ADVANCED is limited to 4,000 nits, 5,000 nits, or any figure below 10,000 nits. Both specifications support the complete PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) brightness range from 0 to 10,000 nits, as defined by SMPTE ST 2084 — the international standard for HDR video. The 4,000-nit figure that appears in some HDR comparisons originated during a period when a widely used HDR reference monitor capable of approximately 4,000 nits of peak brightness was the standard mastering tool at many studios. Content from that era was graded to a 4,000-nit ceiling because that was what the equipment could display — not because any HDR10+ specification required it. That monitor has since been discontinued.

HDR10+ and all major HDR formats that use the PQ transfer function share the same 10,000-nit brightness ceiling — it is a property of the shared standard, not of any individual format. When a comparison claims one HDR format supports 10,000 nits and another supports only 4,000, it is describing a historical difference in mastering practice, not a difference in what the specifications permit. HDR10+ content has already been mastered to the full 10,000-nit range. The Spears & Munsil Ultra HD HDR Benchmark (2023 Edition) — a professional 4K Blu-ray test disc used by display manufacturers, calibrators, and AV reviewers worldwide — encodes content mastered at 10,000 nits in HDR10+ alongside HDR10 and other formats. It is commercially available and has been reviewed by Sound & Vision, AVForums, and TechRadar, among others.

Most professional HDR content today is mastered to 1,000 nits, matching the peak capability of current premium consumer displays. The brightness a viewer experiences is determined by their display’s panel capability — not the HDR format. A television with 1,000 nits of peak brightness shows all HDR formats at the same maximum brightness. What HDR10+’s dynamic metadata does is ensure your display uses its full brightness capability intelligently: optimizing tone mapping for each scene rather than applying a single fixed setting to the entire program, so every scene looks its best on whatever display you have.

No. Both HDR10+ and HDR10+ ADVANCED support quantization up to 16 bits at the specification level — this has been true since HDR10+’s introduction. Today’s streaming services deliver all HDR content at 10 bits because that is the current ceiling of practical streaming video codecs, a constraint that applies equally to every HDR format. The standard is not the limit; the codec is.

Some HDR formats are marketed as supporting 12 bits. In streaming, these formats are also delivered at 10 bits, the same as HDR10+. The 12-bit capability refers to a specific disc format with very limited real-world adoption by studios. A separate claim holds that a different color encoding method makes 10-bit “equivalent to 12-bit.” Published research puts the actual efficiency improvement from this method at approximately 10% for certain content — a real but modest advantage, and far short of the four-fold precision difference that distinguishes 10-bit from 12-bit.

Bit depth and peak brightness are also independent. HDR10+ uses the PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) transfer function defined in SMPTE ST 2084, which covers content from 0 to 10,000 nits regardless of bit depth. Claims that 10-bit color depth limits HDR to 1,000 nits are technically incorrect.

While 4K resolution and higher frame rates improve detail and motion smoothness, HDR fundamentally enhances the realism of an image by expanding the range between the darkest blacks and brightest whites in a scene (what cinematographers call “grayscale”. ) This allows viewers to see subtle gradations in “shadows” and “highlights” that mimic natural human vision, making HDR a key factor for better picture quality. This has been recognized by movie studios, OTT streaming services, broadcasting networks, and professionals.

For the latest list of UHD Blu-Ray discs that support HDR10+, please see the following website.

HDR10+ devices are tested and certified for quality and compatibility. Please see the list of certified products to see if yours are HDR10+ certified.

Yes, HDR10+ is completely backwards compatible with HDR10. An HDR10 only device that receives and HDR10+ signal will play without issues in HDR10.

Because HDR10+ is backwards compatible with HDR10, when HDR10+ content is viewed on an HDR10 display, it is simply just HDR10 content.

HDR10+ uses dynamic metadata to deliver scene-by-scene or frame-by-frame instructions for brightness, contrast, and color. This allows the display to optimize tone mapping in real time, preserving the detail in both shadows and highlights.  HDR10+ Live encoding (e.g. for sports) always uses frame-by-frame data while VOD content uses scene-based data of which many scenes may be a single frame or a short sequence.