- Challenges Of Broadcast Television Aspect Ratio Changes
I find the period where television was transitioning from 4:3 to 16:9 an interesting one. When broadcasting began in 16:9, but people were still actively using 4:3 televisions, broadcasters would commonly either letterbox the content or expect the left and right edges to be cropped. This led to a period where television series direction avoided putting anything too important at the horizontal edges of the frame. Cinema faced similar challenges, and either embraced pan-and-scan, letterboxing, or careful reframing from a wider image.
Content made exclusively for television broadcast, such as news shows, often had all interface elements centred in the image with nothing of substance in the 16:9 exclusive portions:
You can see this effect in action with The Onion’s morning show, Today Now!. Compare Disney Geneticists Debut New Child Stars, which is in 4:3, to Missing Teen’s Friends Go On TV To Plead For Her Release, Gossip About Ugly Classmates, which is in 16:9 but includes all important information within a 4:3 safe zone.
To mitigate the complexities of working with two aspect ratios, broadcasters (mainly in Europe) opted for an aspect ratio of 14:9 as a compromise. It wasn’t optimal on 16:9 displays or 4:3 displays and was pillarboxed or letterboxed, respectively.
The cropping of a wider image reminds me of open mattes, which is where film is captured at a larger size and then matted down to a specific aspect ratio, such as by applying bars on the tops (letterboxing) or sides (pillarboxing). Take the 35mm open matte of Spider-Man (2002). Extra content is there; it is just hidden by the aspect ratio. It is by this method that more full frames can be achieved by merging various source mediums.
The embrace of 16:9 from 4:3 is also tied up in the switch from standard definition to high definition and analogue to digital, meaning that content is large on the screen – especially text, which can be blurred by low-resolution displays and fuzzy CRTs. It is an interesting period of transition, and as a front-end developer I can’t help but think of it in terms of progressive enhancement.
For people without widescreen displays, content functioned and continued as normal without interruption. For people with capable television sets, however, they got an improved experience. As time progressed and 4:3 became less common, it switched from progressive enhancement to graceful degradation on displays still using the old aspect ratio, as we often see as newer technology reaches wider adoption.