Just watching Fiver via Freeview on DVBViewer and the bitrate is only 1.8-2.7 and the res only 544 x 576, so it appears not all the channels on Freeview do have full 720 x 576 res and a higher bitrate after all.

I don't know why you thought that might be the case, but even Channel 4 is 704*576, with most of its variants (film4 excepted) being 544*576, as are most ITV variants. ITV1 is also 704*576, while bizarrely ITV2+1 is 720*576.

http://dtt.me.uk/

Well, plenty of people on here have stated that freeview channels transmit at a higher bitrate/res, thanks to your chart we can see this is mostly not the case. The exceptions seem to be ITV1 and C4 that transmit at 704 x 576 compare to 544 x 576 on sat, not sure there's much difference in the bitrate.

Ah, OK. The ones that matter most to me are 720.

I don't know why there are holes in that chart, but I can tell you BBC4 (and FWIW BBC3 ) are 720 as well. BBC1 in particular has a pretty high bitrate, generating about 2 Gigs/hour, which you can really see on some films. Most other 720s tend to weigh in around 1 ish per hour.

As I said in another thread, it doesnt matter whether it's 704 or 720 the visible region is 702 the rest is apparently overscan.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/t...turesize.shtml

You only really need 720 to watch the test card
Maybe that's on ITV2+1 sometimes

Which tvs / boxes correctly show 702 reather than 720 or 704 ?