@Roger_Gooner wrote:
You make an apples and pears comparison. UHD is a premium product and you only get it if you pay extra. And you haven't answered the point I made: Sky Sports broadcasts in HD, so it makes no sense to also broadcast one channel but upscaled to UHD.
There are plenty of other examples - ITV 4 broadcasts a lot of SD upscaled to HD, but Virgin Media charged more for the HD channel than the SD channel up until a couple of weeks ago.
Sky Sports Main Event UHD will be a mixture of events in UHD and the rest of the time in upscaled HD. It is the channel most viewers will watch the UHD content.
Part of the logic of HLG is that eventually (like the HD channels quoted with SD material) Virgin Media will be able to broadcast just a UHD channel, and all can use it independent of whether they have a HLG UHD TV set or not.
Obviously, like the HD channels, this will depend on the cost structure, and whether the content provider provides such content, which outside of live sport is unlikely with downloads and streaming taking over. It also means that the technical issues mentioned above are overcome, but this is a long term strategy.
Feel free to dislike the strategies adopted here, but take them up with Virgin Media and the content providers who adopt them (and feel free to not watch the channels involved).
Meanwhile, as others have posted, for the rest of us the additional bandwidth allocated to the channel means that upscaled content will look better for many on the UHD version of a channel than on the HD and the SD versions.