The 4K Question Is Really a Question About the Line

4K is in every plan here, so the interesting question is never whether it is in the list. It is whether the line under you tonight can carry it. At home that is something you can fix: move the box, run a cable, pay for a faster package. In a rented cottage, a hotel room or a spare bedroom in a house that is not yours, the line is whatever it is, and the only lever left is which version of the channel you open.

That is why this page is arranged around connections rather than around televisions. The hardware question gets a table further down and it is usually the easy half. The connection is the half that changes every time you sleep somewhere new.

The number that decides it

One 4K stream wants a steady 25 Mbps arriving at that one device. Fifty is comfortable and leaves the rest of the building some room. Wired beats wireless for anything at this bitrate, and if there is a router with a spare socket and a cable in the drawer, that single change fixes more 4K problems than every setting in the app put together.

The same number tells you what it costs in data. At 25 Mbps a stream is about 11 GB an hour, so a film and a match in the same evening eats a serious share of a monthly allowance. An HD feed at roughly 8 Mbps works out near 3.6 GB an hour, and a lighter one at 5 Mbps about 2.25 GB. Those are arithmetic rather than measurements, but they are the numbers to run before you decide a hotspot will carry the weekend.

Five places you might be watching from

A note on the fourth row, because it catches people out. A sign-in page is not something to get around; it is how that network is run, and what it does or does not permit is for the people who run it to decide. The practical point is narrower: a stick has no browser to show the page to, so the connection never opens for it. A phone can answer the page and share the connection, and a small travel router can answer it once and pass the line on to everything you brought. Ask at the desk if you are unsure what is allowed.

Which feeds are genuinely Ultra HD

Plenty of services attach a 4K badge to whatever they were already sending. The question worth asking is whether the event was produced in 4K in the first place, because adding pixels to a smaller picture adds size without adding detail. The categories below carry feeds that were genuinely made that way, at a bitrate that survives the trip, and each one sits beside an HD copy of the same channel.

• Sport: Formula 1, the Champions League, Premier League matches on Sky Sports and TNT Sports UHD, the tennis grand slams and the golf majors, NBA and NHL national games, and NFL on FOX and CBS 4K.
• Fight nights: UFC, boxing and WWE premium events carried in 4K on the night.
• Film and factual: the 4K film channels, nature and travel channels, and a 4K section inside the on-demand library.

The kit that has to keep up

Two things to carry if 4K matters to you away from home: a short HDMI extender, because the socket on a wall-mounted set faces the plaster and a stick wedged in sideways runs hot, and a flat Ethernet cable, which costs very little and beats every wireless setting in the menu. Our Firestick guide covers the decoder settings, and the TiViMate guide shows where hardware decoding lives.

What the Ultra HD feeds cost: nothing on top

There are four terms — one month, three, six and twelve — and four tiers, set by how many streams play at the same moment. The Ultra HD feeds sit inside all sixteen combinations. A month on a single stream is $15; a year on a single stream comes to about $5.75 a month. Between those two ends the picture does not change at all: the term sets the price, the tier sets how many people can watch different things at the same time. Nothing renews by itself, no card is kept on file, and the 7-day guarantee stands behind a plan that will not run on your device. The plans page puts the four terms side by side.

When HD is simply the better call

On a phone, a tablet or a small set in a spare room, HD and 4K look the same from any normal distance and HD uses about a quarter of the data. On a shared connection in a rented house it is also the version that keeps playing while somebody upstairs starts a large download. The channel list files the 4K, HD and SD copies of the main channels together, so the choice is made per channel with one click rather than per plan at checkout.

The honest summary is that 4K earns its keep on a big screen, on a line you control, for things shot to be looked at — sport, landscape, a film you chose deliberately. Away from that, the useful feature is not the resolution. It is having the same account, the same groups and a copy of every channel that will still play on whatever connection the week has handed you. Before you hand back the keys, sign out of a television that is not yours; the setup guides show where that lives in each app.