Surprised that anyone in Europe does 720p
It's quite common outside the UK.
SVT in Sweden, NRK in Norway, DR in Denmark, ARD and ZDF in Germany all use 720/50p for broadcast. HOWEVER NRK and SVT produce internally either in 1080/25p or 1080/50i (aka 1080p25 or 1080i25) and cross-convert on transmission (I don't think any of them are using 1080/50p internally yet). I think Sky Italia use 720p for their sports channels as well (I may be wrong)
It does seem to be partially a PSB thing though - as TV3 pan-Nordic, TV4 in Sweden, as I think are the two unrelated TV2s in Norway and Denmark - are all 1080i.
I've got a Blu-ray of an SVT series which was 720/50p (and shot 25p) - so I think they may have done some original production in 720p at one point - but AIUI these days their internal studios, OB trucks and location stuff is all 1080.he
The EBU, after research carried out by SVT, was pushing 720/50p over 1080/50i at one point, because deinterlacing at the consumer level wasn't great, and 1080i needed higher bitrates for the same perceived picture quality as 720p. However Sky and the BBC did tests which didn't match the results that SVT got - so 1080i became the dominant standard in the UK. For 1080/25p acquired material, there does seem to definitely be a benefit to 1080p carried over 1080i when compared with 720p - and this is becoming more pronounced as 2160p displays (aka UHD1 "4K") become more popular. 720p on a 2160p display looks noticably softer to me.
Last edited by noggin on 7 June 2015 12:33pm - 2 times in total