Google Play Movies is the latest Samsung TV app that's adding support for the HDR10+ standard as of today, with the feature already being live in 117 countries the world over. By all accounts, this addition appears to be encompassing virtually every market in which Samsung is selling its smart television sets at all, which is a pleasant surprise considering how disinterested Google can act toward Europe when it comes to new service launches or major platform upgrades. In any case, if you own a contemporary Samsung TV with HDR10+ support, there's a good chance the Google Play Movies app already updated itself earlier today.
Today's development comes shortly after Google Play Movies started adding HDR10+ support to various versions of its smart TV app.
Another major milestone for HDR10+
Samsung co-developed HDR10+ in collaboration with Panasonic and 20th Century Fox as an open-source and royalty-free standard for encoding and decoding HDR content. The endeavor took several years but was deemed necessary in light of the fact the only other high-end standard on the market – Dolby Vision – is a paid technology that can hence never be truly ubiquitous. With standardized next-gen HDR support out of the way, content taking full advantage of modern TV displays is steadily increasing in volume.
Google Play Movies is far from the first major on-demand video platform offering 4K HDR10+ content to Samsung TV owners. Amazon's Prime Video has been doing the same for a while now and was the first to embrace Samsung's standard way back in late 2017. With most major distribution platforms already on board with HDR10+, Samsung is now steadily turning its focus in the space toward more direct content partnerships.
