ProbablyYou might just be overthinking this a bit.
Not 7 bit vs 16 bit. It would only require 7 bit vs 8 bit. The latest system is 32 bit. Why does everything have to cost millions? Evidently they aren’t even particularly sophisticated displays.Surely the more pressing question is how much would it cost, and how long would it take, to reconfigure the pendos to display the £ sign? While I can understand it wasn't priority no.1, surely Virgin were considering the possibility of using them to advertise upgrades, so to not have included it for the sake of 7-bit vs 16-bit seems a tad silly.
Of course, it'll probably involve a hardware change and the software will now no longer be supported, so it'll manage to cost £15m.
Hopefully.I'll be someone on the programming screen at Avanti who can't use it quite properly.