[pessimizer]

I have to believe that this has been rigorously tested, and that a lot of viewers are lost when they see black bars on their television.

I remember back in 4:3 when it was far harder to find letterboxed VHS tapes, and when filmmakers often would make sure their scope movies also worked in 4:3 by filming in 4:3 and cropping to scope (with the exception of a few hundred accidentally revealed boom mics.) I have to believe that people would just get angry if they got home and realized that their tape wasn't going to utilize their entire television, so that's how the market shook out. The funny thing about movies from that period mentioned is that really both versions of a film were incomplete.

I also remember my grandparents watching DirectTV streams that were clearly stretched out horizontally on the screen, and how they didn't notice at all. They'd notice black bars.

Now that TVs are somewhere midway between 4:3 and scope, the problem has reversed itself. I've seen it solved by zoom, I've seen it solved by horizontal stretch, I've seen it solved by half-zoom and half-stretch, I've seen it solved by either half-zoom or half-stretch combined with half-black bars, even. Just showing it in 4:3 with black bars on both sides isn't significantly more popular than any of these options. And I have to believe that there's research, because, as this story shows, zooming can be expensive. You can do it automatically, and lose everyone's feet and the tops of their heads (or their whole heads in the right shots), or go over everything manually, moving individual shots that turn out badly up and down in a way that might depend on story. Also reducing the number of vertical scanlines makes old tv look like shit, so you might have to spend effort doing something about that. For that last, you can be saved if the series was shot on film and you have access to original materials...

All of this is good, because it is an impossible problem for industry to solve, therefore it will encourage piracy by purists, and piracy for things that aren't Seinfeld episodes will get a free userbase and attendant infrastructure. Also good for piracy are geoblocking and delayed broadcast times between countries. Here's hoping that the next Game of Thrones-type blockbuster series airs a day later in the UK:)

The funniest thing about 4:3 on 16:9 is that everyone's tv is the size of a bus now, and a black-barred 4:3 picture is certainly going to be a lot larger on those than the LP-sized screens families would have been watching the original broadcasts on.

[navjack27]

The whole concept of black bars has always confused me. I know what they are I know what people generally accept the concept of what they are. but they aren't actually what they are. There are no black bars. The content is the size that it is and it's just stretching undistorted to your screen. It's not adding black bars. You're just not using parts of your screen because you shouldn't be using those parts of your screen. Maybe if content like that had a old console TV bezel on the side that had channel dials and the power button and a speaker on one side and half of a bezel and a blurry living room background with a picture of a family on the other that would make people feel more comfortable?

[Brian_K_White]

This. In another comment I tried to equate it with a painting on a wall. A painting never fills the wall. The painting is whatever size and shape it is, and that's that.

Maybe the problem is a tv looks like a frame, and frames are made custom to fit the painting, and so any discrepency looks bad.

But now that tv's are both huge, and are featureless panels with little to no interesting frame let alone actual furniture quality cabinetry, maybe only now they can start to be seen as mini walls where it would actually be kind of pathological to require that every pixel always be lit just because they exist.