Don’t virgin just point a dish at 28.2e and refeed the same picture if so maybe the picture is soft on Sky now or virgin have put the wrong encoding settings on maybe?
I was under the impression that the concept of pointing a dish at 28.2 for cable distribution went out the window years ago and it was all done differently now. Part of Virgin's advertising for the benefit of cable over satellite says you won't lose the signal when it rains (in fairness you don't lose it on a dish if its setup correctly, and it would only take a monsoon or a heavy thunderstorm or a mass build up of snow to totally block it even then, and that being said its only temporary anyway).
There are still some channels delivered to Virgin via them picking up the satellite broadcast on 28.2, particularly the smaller broadcasters, but most of them are delivered via fibre now. Certainly in Sky's case they will be delivering over fibre now, the cable version of the channel disappeared off 28.2 years ago.
Taking a look at the
monitoring on the Digital Bitrate website, it seems that Virgin played around with the multiplex on the 5th as all the channels on it, including Sky News and interestingly Sky Sports PL, briefly went unencrypted. It seems it's running at generally low bitrates with a resolution of 544x576, which would explain the degraded picture.