I am just watching the UK FA Cup soccer game via a free preview of Fox Sports World - obviously standard definition, and I am watching it on a HD set.

It's borderline unwatchable. Soccer at best is one of the worst things Rogers ever broadcast in SD digital, but this is a joke. Or are they deliberately compressing it because it's a preview?

Rogers has different amounts of compression on the various SD channels. All of them are compressed, but the ones that are less watched are usually more compressed, although the sports channels may look worse if there's lots of action.

Rogers puts about 8-12 digital channels on the 6 MHz used by a single analogue channel.

Premium channels like TMN get more bandwidth and usually look excellent. Most of the channels 1-70 or so also usually look good. The less-watched channels typically have more compression and the PQ can certainly be poor on some of them, although some of them come to Rogers in pretty poor shape to begin with.

How does it look on commercials? Sometimes it seems that some of Fox's source material is pretty compressed to begin with.

I usually check out the preview channel every week and when I have the actual channel on preview in my package I compare the picture quality and I can tell you every time, the preview channel's version is of lesser quality.

I find it amazing how much the quality varies on Rogers stations, for SD in particular. Some look worse than a poorly received OTA analog station, and others look DVD-quality.