[James2001]

It is interesting when it'd often treated as if increasing resolution is the be all and end all, I'm sure I remember reading the BBC had a choice if increasing the iPlayer to either 1080p or 50p, and they went with the latter because the trials suggested it gave a bigger perceptible quality increase.

I don't recall people complaining when Freeview HD started doing 1080p25, I do however remember complaints when they got new coders for BBC hd and dropped the bitrate.

Probably because it switches between 25p and 50i dynamically depending on content (I think it improves the quality of the encode doing it that way rather than treating it as interlaced), so it will only be 25p on content that was actually made that way, it won't be filmising 50i material, unlike the permanent 25p on most streaming services.

Admittedly interlacing is an arse to work with in this day and age, produces a lot of complications and will pretty much always need to find itself de-interlacing somewhere down the line (unless you're still watching on a CRT!), and the quality of deinterlacing can vary wildly (and I've seen terrible examples of deinterlacing to 50/60p as well as 25/30).

UHD is entirely progressive at least... but even that doesn't stop 50/60p content often being converted to 25/30p (though at least you aren't throwing away vertical resolution like with interlacing- which is another one of the major issues with converting 50/60i to 25/30p, no wonder SD content on streaming often looks so poor. Even HD is effectively cut to 540 lines unless you're using complicated algorithms to work out what is and isn't moving between fields and there isn't much motion).

Well, you CAN keep the full resolution when converting to 25/30p... but then you get the so-called "mouse teeth" artifacts- I've seen that happen.