----- Original Message ----- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
That's it. As most new sets on sale now are 16:9, and not the wide variety of apsect ratios you keep claiming, I'll predict that the 4:3 shows will dwindle in time.
An odd thing has happened in the US market as opposed to the European market.
In Europe, 16:9 PAL sets have been around for many years, and the Europeans developed a signaling method using data in the vertical interval to indicate if a particular program was transmitted in anamorphic 16:9, letterboxed 16:9 within a 4:3 frame, or full frame 4:3. Because of that, you will find a lot of true 16:9 SD programming there in DTV as well.
In the US, with possibly one or two obscure exceptions, we have not had any NTSC 16:9 sets for sale to the US public. Therefore, all SD programming is 4:3 exclusively. I would estimate that half of cable programs today are letterboxed, but not one channel is in anamorphic SD 16:9. This makes sense, since the US never adopted or adapted the European vertical interval screen format signaling to NTSC.
Once analog is turned off in 2009, this situation will not change. There are too many legacy SD cable channels and television sets to change this trend. Therefore, even though anamorphic 16:9 is an ATSC SD format, it is rarely if ever used, and will continue to remain so even as more 16:9 sets are sold.
In the US, 16:9 will forever remain the exclusive domain of HD.
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