[RichardCoulter]

A chap who works in the industry has offered me his thoughts on the theory (but also has his doubts):

"For Virgin to deliver all BBC 1 regions in HD, would still require the Beeb to upgrade the distribution and contribution circuits to each regional studio to HD, and equip the SD regions with upscalers and downscalers, which is a large chunk of the upgrade work they do not have the funds for.

Unless, Virgin are going to take the current BBC1 HD England feed, and 'splice' up converted regional feeds during the opt out slots. I can't imagine the BBC agreeing to that, and I'm not sure Ofcom would be too happy from a service licensing perspective".

Maybe VM are to somehow make channels 108 and 162 swap over to the SD feed for the local news etc instead of the holding slate currently provided??

That's a good point about the Channel Islands, I never thought about that!

So, from a VM point of view there are only 14 regional BBC1's plus 3 BBC2's which adds up to 17. If VM show BBC1 London news on the proper BBC1 HD channel 108, that gets it down to 16 again!

Here's hoping that this is correct and that any Ofcom & service licensing issues have been overcome!

Whilst viewers outside London, Scotland, Wales and NI wouldn't get their local programmes in HD, at least they wouldn't have to faff about changing from 108 to 101 and 162 to 102.