Mr Ghostface said:

Harmy said:

Well, the broadcasts themselves weren't perhaps 1080p, but the captures of them available on the internet sure were.

That doesn't even make sense.

A capture is not 1080p or any other broadcast resolution and although I know what you meant, a capture at a high resolution does not contain more information/detail than its source.

No, I don't think you do know what I meant.

Let's see:

Each frame of 1080i video consists of two fields of 1920×540 pixels each.

The field rate of 1080i is typically 60 Hz for countries that use or used System M as analog broadcast television system (such as United States, Canada, Japan, and Brazil) or 50 Hz for regions that traditionally used television systems with 25 frames/s rate

In other words, as these were PAL land broadcasts, they were effectively broadcast at 25fps (50 field p/s), so all the information for every frame was there, only it was divided between two fields - so you can then put these two fields together and what you get is a full 1080p frame, so the on-line available captures of the 1080i 50fields p/s broadcast were native 1080p 25fps.