The broadcast of the highly anticipated The Last of Us comes with bad news: it is not offered in 4K UHD on Amazon Prime Video.
When Amazon announced that its Prime Video platform will offer the series The Last of Us from January 16 (after several days of vagueness), we wondered if she would have the right to preferential treatment in terms of broadcast quality. We now have the answer, and it will not please those who like to watch a film or a series in the best conditions.
You will have to settle for a 1080p stream to The Last of Us on Amazon Prime Video. Numerama was able to verify this on three different devices (PS5, Xbox Series S and Apple TV 4K): none displays the ‘UHD’ and ‘HDR’ pictograms when you go to the series page (the content does not appear not when doing a ‘4K’ search either). The observation also applies to the sound part, since The Last of Usadaptation of a cult video game released on PS3, is limited to a 5.1 track, without Dolby Atmos.
The Last of Us series is not broadcast in 4K UHD in France on Amazon
We really expected better treatment for The Last of Us, the event of this beginning of the year 2023, promised to a box of audience after the plebiscite of the press (and the first dithyrambic returns). But France is once again the turkey of the farce, since The Last of Us is broadcast in 4K UHD on HBO Max (the American channel). This is not the first time that we have been wronged: on OCS, HBO’s flagship series like Game Of Thrones or House of the Dragon have always been broadcast in 1080p.
When we look at the page of The Last of Uswe quickly realize that the series is broadcast with the bare minimum in terms of choice: two languages (English, French), two subtitle options (English, French), no audio description… It’s meager , for a program that will be released in 2023… Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the broadcasting rights of The Last of Us were acquired late by Amazon, and that the platform managed, in a few days, to offer a distribution solution in France – while many fans were already deploring the probable absence of the series in H+24.
This is even more to be deplored when we compare The Last of Us original content offered by Amazon Prime Video. The platform goes all out with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power — which seems quite normal, since she bought the rights, and produced the entire series. This adaptation offers an incalculable number of spoken and written translations (there’s even Catalan), the latest broadcasting technologies (Dolby Atmos and HDR Dolby Vision) and audio description… That’s what we expect from a recent series, especially when it is based on a high-flying achievement. The cinematography of The Last of Us deserves so much more than a 1080p stream.
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