Now TV have published a help guide to the boost. It appears only two Sky Sports channels are 1080/50. Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League. You also get three simultaneous connections,
Fox is staying at 720p and Gold in SD. As I speak, SyFy is still in SD, although that is going FHD.
Presumably most of the content on the channels that show drama is 25p (or 23.976p sped up to 25p) - so those remaining 25p makes sense. Sky News would benefit from 50p, as would any channels carrying entertainment shows shot 50Hz interlaced.
Gold would be nice in 50p when it is showing stuff shot interlaced in studio - such as sit coms.
I've seen Gold on Sky in FHD and the SD content does benefit from the upscaling. Incidentally the Gold commissions including The Cockfields is still 720p only on NOW TV VOD despite being filmed in 1080i.
From what I've seen, most if not all Sky Cinema VOD is now 1080p/50fps, live is 1080p/25fps. I've got a day Sky Sports Pass which I'll use at the weekend to test the 50fps on Main Event/Premier League.
The main benefit of going FHD has been for me personally on Nat Geo Wild. The wildlife programmes really do look much better.
So it looks like the SD only live channels are the Viacom kids channels, Comedy Central and Gold. Fox stays at 720p. MTV which is a Viacom channel has gone FHD.
Just been onto Live Chat .... and they gave me another offer, which wasn't asked for. Will be useful going forward. Interesting that although it's not officially listed, if you have the Boost Pass then the content fed to AppleTV is indeed the Boost HD content.
Watching the Cricket on SSME, I don't believe the quality attained matches that of BT Sport's 1080p AppleTV app. There's a significant improvement yes, but...... There's an awful contrast between the Cricket in 50fps on SSME and that on SSCricket in 25fps though. The latter seemingly showing only a little improvement on the previous 720p product.
Tomorrow's Championship Football will be a good test.
Now checking the SSME feed of EFL Fulham v QPR, Looking fine and should be an acceptable alternative for the direct IPTV feed on BTTV in due course. No obvious puddling on the pitch and the ball is moving across the screen without undue 'skipping'. Watching on SS Football however shows the necessity that the other channels need to go to 50fps asap.
I know some people who post at 'the other place' have had some issues, including pixelation, but for me personally, bar one issue of pixelation on Thursday when it launched, the 1080p streams have been rock solid.
Finally got round to watching some football on Now TV this afternoon. First time I've watched a match of any form of IPTV that looks as good as watching on linear tv.
Now (no pun intended) if they can increase the fps to 50 for all sports channels, NOW TV would be a credible alternative to spending a shed load on Sky or Virgin.
With the offers that periodically pop up, plus the wide variety of platforms it's accessible on, NowTV is a very good choice for live football - that's what I use it for. And tbh I don't notice the framerate or the fact it's *only* 720p... it works fine on my 32" TVs.
Once BT Sport arrives on it I will ditch my Virgin Media sub.