The Foundation of Sky’s Technical Specification (Or Why 100 Nits Is Not HDR)

“The only line that can be drawn objectively is SDR’s 100 nits. Anything above that in principle is HDR.” Yoeri Geutskens, “We Need to Talk About HDR”. FlatpanelsHD (Oct. 2020)

“It is perfectly acceptable to deliver scenes or projects at 100 nits or less in an HDR delivery.” Kevin Shaw, CSI, LinkedIn comment (Nov. 2025)

The claim “100-nit video in an HDR container is High Dynamic Range” is a fallacy. To understand why, we’ve got to differentiate between the container format and the actual content characteristics. 

The fallacy relies on conflating the capacity of the container with the nature of the content it holds. The argument goes like this:

1. The Major Premise (Fact)

An HDR video container (e.g., PQ, HLG, Dolby Vision) is a file format or signal standard capable of encoding a wide range of luminance values (typically mastered to 1K or 4K nits).

2. The Minor Premise (Fact)

A video having a peak brightness of ~100 nits has been technically encoded and wrapped within this HDR container format.

3. The Fallacious Conclusion:

Therefore, the ~100-nit video has become HDR content. 

This specific fallacy is a variation of the more general fallacy of composition (applying attributes of the whole to its parts). The attributes of the content are independent of the potential capacity of the container. 

The content’s dynamic range is established at the time of creation and encoding. The container doesn’t magically generate the missing dynamic range. The video remains LDR content formatted for an HDR pipe. 

If we extend this flawed logic to its inevitable endpoint—that a file with a 0.0005-nit peak luminance could be labeled HDR—the complete conceptual bankruptcy of the “container defines content” argument is exposed. 

The logical distinction between container and content is the foundation for Sky’s clauses. Sky demands a “perceptual increase in dynamic range” (the content must change) and rejects grades with “no benefit over SDR” (the container alone isn’t enough). Their policy is the contractual enforcement of this logical truth.