brian hefele's untidy spaceI don't mean content. As far as broadcast networks are concerned, there is enough decent content right now that I can't complain too much. Of course, for every good bit of content there are nineteen downright awful pieces, but still there is enough.
No, my plight is in delivery. On June 12, 2009, all broadcast signals switched over to digital. This meant a few practical things - it would become much more difficult to receive signals that were strong enough to watch, but once you found a signal you'd have several feeds there instead of the one channel you had before. This is pretty awesome, it means that on a day where everything that I used to receive actually comes in, my channel total is closer to 25 than 7.
Part of the DTV spec is that it allows a variety of formats. Both standard widescreen HD formats are acceptable, as well as widescreen and fullscreen on an SD feed. I'm only able to receive SD, which surely taints my experience. And oh, what a miserable experience it is.
Most channels seem to output their primary feeds in widescreen SD. Unfortunately, not all of the content is in widescreen, which makes for a tiny, low resolution image bordered by both letter- and pillarboxes. Thankfully, receiver boxes tend to have a zoom option to correct for this. A worse situation arises in commercials, many of which have been shot/edited widescreen, and then rendered and output in fullscreen with letterboxes already added. So if the show you're watching is in widescreen (thus, you're zoomed out) and a commercial comes on screen in the aforementioned format, you end up with something inside pillarboxes, and essentially double-letterboxed. A tiny image hiding in the center of your screen.
A lot of the secondary feeds, on the other hand, are only shown in the fullscreen format. This is kind of a step backward, and it shows when they decide to run fresh content (that has already screened on the primary feed) which was designed to air in widescreen. Since it was made to run wide on a feed that was made to handle wide, the result is simply that the left and right sides are chopped off. This isn't even pan-and-scan, it's just sit-and-miss.
Aside from the fact that it's now hard-as-hell to get channels to come in, this transition has been mostly positive. Yet content creators and distributors need to work out these format quirks soon. This transitional era must become a mere blip in memory, a story to confuse our children with about the days when the TV image was only 3/4 the size of the TV itself.