The wait for HDR10+ Advanced is over - as long as you have one of these TVs
For a while now, I've been talking about two new HDR formats: Dolby Vision 2 and HDR10+ Advanced. The short version is that both are an attempt to solve the deficiencies of the past, while taking advantage of the brighter and overall more powerful TVs being introduced today. In theory, there should be less worry about overly dark scenes, or motion smoothing making a $200 million blockbuster look like it cost $20,000.
Thanks to a contact of mine at Samsung, there's more to say about HDR10+ Advanced. At long last, you can both buy a TV with the tech and actually find something to watch -- although you might still want to wait a few months if you haven't already tossed in your chips.
How and where to watch content in HDR10+ Advanced
Walking a tightrope
The first requirement is one of Samsung's 2026 Neo QLED, OLED, or MicroRGB TVs, one example being the S95H. This makes sense -- although Advanced is a royalty-free standard that anyone can adopt, Samsung is its primary backer and developer. The company depends on all the flavors of HDR10, as it refuses to pay fees for Dolby Vision, even on TVs costing five or six digits.
As of this writing, there's just one compatible movie: the new Masters of the Universe streaming on Amazon Prime Video. This isn't a coincidence. Amazon MGM is the movie's US distributor, and Prime Video was the first service to support the original HDR10+, which rolled out in 2017. If you've got a compatible Samsung TV, Advanced should kick in automatically when you choose Filmmaker Mode from your picture options. Make sure your TV is updated to the latest available firmware first.
I'm told that Amazon is working on "backfilling" compatibility for everything on Prime Video, or rather everything available in HDR. There's no word on how long that will take, but it could be a monumental effort. The company can't just flip a switch. Individual studios have to remaster their releases with expanded metadata, and some of them may not be in a rush to add Advanced unless Amazon is applying pressure.
As for the world beyond Amazon and Samsung, I'm promised that there will be "more streaming services to come." That's likely to be every major platform, given that services like Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+, and even YouTube already support HDR10+. I should note that it took until 2025 for HDR10+ to be supported across Disney+ and Hulu, so hopefully everyone is a little more aggressive this time around.
Advanced should reach other TV brands in the near future, though nothing firm has been announced. Some bad news is that Samsung doesn't have any plans to bring the standard to pre-2026 TVs. This may be a consequence of processor requirements, assuming the tech is anything like Dolby Vision 2. That format just won't run on anything slower than a MediaTek Pentonic 800 chip.
Why does HDR10+ Advanced matter?
Fixing a hole and building a mountain
Advanced expands the metadata available to filmmakers, a key focus being "AI-driven" tone mapping to improve shadow detail while supporting the extreme brightness of the best new TVs. I'm also expecting this to help budget and mid-tier TVs, though, given that fixing that gap is an explicit goal of Dolby Vision 2. Like Vision 1, HDR10+ can sometimes render scenes too dark if it's paired with less-than-stellar specs.
The new format adapts on a genre-by-genre basis, which is crucial for one feature in particular: Intelligent Motion Smoothing. Traditionally, smoothing has been applied as a universal setting on TVs, improving news and sports, but wrecking movies and "prestige" TV shows. This happens because the standard cinematic framerate is 24fps, which produces a natural, dreamlike motion blur. Motion smoothing inserts artificially generated frames, not only killing this blur, but reminding people of the cheap shot-on-tape soap operas of the '80s and '90s. Since Advanced can control smoothing based on metadata, it should be reduced or disabled as necessary without impacting everything else.