Samsung’s HDR10 Plus Advanced is launching this month on Prime Video

The announcement signals that Samsung is moving its proprietary HDR pipeline forward by making HDR10 Plus Advanced the first non-Dolby HDR format to reach a major streaming service. The rollout is tied to the 2026 television series Samsung just announced, meaning only those units will have the necessary hardware and firmware to interpret the new metadata. Prime Video will be the initial distribution channel, so any title that wants to use the format must be prepared for that ecosystem.

From a technical standpoint, HDR10 Plus Advanced adds extra metadata that describes not just overall brightness but also localized screen zones and genre-specific characteristics such as lighting, motion, or perspective. This enables the TV to perform tone-mapping on a per-area basis rather than applying a single curve to the whole frame, and it introduces an "Intelligent Motion Smoothing" step that can adapt scene-by-scene. Engineers working on encoding pipelines will need to generate and embed these tags, which is a step beyond the static metadata used in baseline HDR10.

For content providers, the change means updating ingest and transcoding workflows to include the new metadata fields. Existing HDR10 Plus streams will not automatically gain the advanced features; they must be re-encoded or have side-car data added. Because the format is not yet widely supported, testing will be required on the target Samsung hardware to verify that the tone-mapping and motion smoothing behave as intended.

Compatibility is narrowly scoped: only Samsung’s 2026 TVs are equipped to decode the advanced metadata, and only titles that Prime Video marks as supported will benefit. Devices from Hisense, Philips, TCL, and other manufacturers are planning support for Dolby Vision 2, not HDR10 Plus Advanced, so cross-brand playback will fall back to baseline HDR10 or Dolby Vision where available. Likewise, other streaming services have not announced support, so the feature will not be usable outside Prime Video until further agreements are made.

Strategically, Samsung is positioning HDR10 Plus Advanced as a cost-free alternative to Dolby Vision 2, avoiding the licensing fee while offering comparable capabilities. This could pressure other manufacturers to consider adopting the same spec if it gains traction, but the current ecosystem limits its impact to a single TV generation and one streaming platform. Engineers should monitor adoption signals, as broader support would eventually require changes to multi-platform delivery pipelines.