Why did it take so long for TVs to go widescreen?

All of the talk today about 4K and technological advancements in cinema being followed by home theater advancements got me wondering:

"widescreen" formats became popular in cinema around the 1950s or so, yet it took nearly half a century for TVs to finally follow. Why is that? Was it because of all the different aspect ratios?

 

A little off topic.

I was in a nice hotel in Collierville, TN last week on business. Flat screen TV in the room. I was trying to watch the tennis (Aussie Open) but the default was 16:9 which stretched the court abnormally. I could set it to 4:3, but it was smaller in area than it needed to be. It was hard to watch and enjoy the game.

 

I find hotel TVs are always pretty messed up. They're usually way out of calibration and/or not being fed HD content.

 

That's for sure. Really dark picture but high contrast - and not HD as you say.

 

I would assume because there were not considered enough early adopters who would be willing to spend the money on new sets (especially before they're mass produced). Not to mention the few stations willing to invest the money on sending out separate widescreen signals.

Back in the 60s and 70s TV was considered cheap. No one expected to spend a hundred dollars or so each month on hidef cable. Or a couple of thousand on a TV set. (Especially when there was no home video format and only a half-dozen channels) No one was about to start explaining

It was a long path from broadcast only to betamax recorders to laserdiscs (which was, for all intents and purposes, the first sign of original aspect ratio acceptance.) Someone had to go first, and it wasn't until laserdiscs (and Criterion in particular) that the general public (such as it was) began to be aware of aspect ratios. I'd be willing to bet most people went to see films in theatres and watched the movie years later on TV and didn't even notice there was a difference.

For decades, TV was just that disposable. It was only broadcast and no one really cared. Until you could buy films to build up a library in your own home (i.e. laserdiscs and then DVDs) there was no marketing system in place for "unedited director's cuts" or additional bonus features or competing aspect ratios. Once there was a profit to be made from software (and different tiers of special editions) then interest began to build to develop a "luxury" quality of hardware. First big screen, then flatscreen, then widescreen. Each of those upgrades made an impressive amount of profit, and that led to manufacturer confidence which led to marketing widescreen TVs.

What took so long? Broadcasters and hardware manufacturers were a timid bunch and it was in no one's best interest to invest millions of dollars in upgrades without any sign that the public cared even one tiny bit. I truly believe that everyone involved was shocked that widescreen laserdiscs and DVDs were so enthusiastically embraced by the general public. No one expected there was just so much money to be made.

 

Bryan...I've been asking this for four years now. Bought my 32" in 2008, and I love it. Love those black bars too.

 

I was working as a manager in two video stores when dvd came out. You would not believe the amount of ignorance and misinformation about widescreen on dvd. Many "mainstream" movies were issued in both formats to appease and widen the potential customer base of those adopting the new format, either as separate releases or as both versions on one disc.

Telling a customer that the black bars allowed them to see the whole picture as it was intended fell on deaf ears many times. They didn't care if the picture was cropped. They wanted it to fill their 4:3 television screen.

 

My worst movie experience was watching a widescreen presentation of "Lawrence of Arabia" on my friends 13" television. We were all laughing our butts off. Surrounded by black bars, the image was like four inches tall!

 

That would be a horrible experience in its own right.

 

I got a chuckle outta it.
-Bill

 

No, it was because of available technology. It was vacuum tube up until the 1960's. Then, only the back end of the sets were solid state, the picture tube was still, well, a tube. It could not be made flat or wide. Further, there was no compelling reason to do so as explained earlier. There wasn't much in the way of TV other than broadcasts. That is what TV was for, it was basically a radio receiver that displayed pictures as well as output sound.

People who wanted full screen movies used projection systems - Real projection systems. Back then, you could get film and those that had a real passion for the movies would rent reels of film for their projectors and show the "movies". It wasn't until VHS that more people wanted to collect movies and to view them on a larger television. At that point, there was rear projection TV, the type with three big RGB lamps behind them. LCD and Plasma screens were not practical until much later.
-Bill

 

I can offer a bit of perspective on this... I bought my first widescreen TV in April of 1998. Yep, 14 years ago. It was a Toshiba TW40H80, 40" wide rear projection set. It was not HD, or even HD-ready. They only had one HD-ready widescreen set at the time, and it was $6000. DVD was still a mystery to most.

Three reasons why widescreen TVs did not catch on sooner:

1) Not much content. Yes, widescreen laserdiscs were around in the 80s and 90s, but the resolution you got from a 2.35:1 movie was only ~200 vertical lines. This was OK on a 32" tube, but on a 60" widescreen set (that was analog), the scan lines were too far apart. There was no line-doubling back then. It was like you were looking venetian blinds. All of the early rear projection big screens had this problem, and it was even worse on a widescreen set, because you had to "blow up" the original 4:3 image. Anamorphic LD never caught on, and early DVDs were not consistently "enhanced for 16x9 TVs", aka anamorphic.

2) Content Pt 2. Way more content was 4:3, so the demand for widescreen would only be from the Laserdisc movie buffs. Hard to make an expensive TV for just those folks, and sell enough to turn a profit.

3. Expensive. Related to the above point. The technology needed for image processing either did not exist, or was very expensive before the year 2000. Reverse telecine for progressive images did not work very well, either in DVD players, or in the TVs themselves. The chips were just not that advanced or cheap. You also had to scale the image for non-native 16:9 content to fill up the screen. Again, not cheap or advanced. It was also hard/expensive to make picture tubes/CRTs in the 16:9 ratio. Also, CRT rear projection was tougher to do well in 16:9 because you had to have more precise focus and geometry at the extreme Left/Right vs. a standard 4:3 TV.

Basically, it took the widespread availability of 16:9 content in ~2001 via primetime HD broadcast for demand to get cooking, and match up with affordable technology of the time.

 

SamS has it basically right, but note that reverse telecine and other processes were not necessary for widescreen TV. Hell, the Japanese NHK network was showing demonstrations of 16x9 HiVision in 1992! And that was analog 1125-line HD, 60 fields!

We were doing NTSC (technically 525) widescreen transfers as early as 1995 or so, and definitely in 1997 when DVD hit. We basically took a widescreen picture and squeezed it down to 4x3 during mastering, then it was re-expanded back to 16x9 on a widescreen monitor in playback. From about 1999 on, I usually was doing everything in HD, even standard-def jobs, and downconverting on the fly. I personally liked seeing the bigger, wider monitor, as did my clients. It worked fine, provided all the equipment was set up correctly. By 2001, I think pretty much all post-production was generally HD, though sometimes only standard-def 4x3 was delivered, and the HD tapes were archived for future use.

Video standards take a long, long time to develop. Look at stereo TV: that started way back around 1985 or so (anybody remember "In Stereo -- Where Available"?), and a lot of stations didn't spend the money to rewire their plants and transmitters for at least another 5-6 years. And stereo was easy! Widescreen and HD are hard.

I think it also helped that manufacturers managed to perfect flatscreen technology in the last 10 years, to the point where you can buy a fairly decent bigscreen set for well under $1000 today. This has pushed widescreen production and broadcasting quite a bit, but you still a lot of "fattenized" programming out there, which drives me up the wall.

 

I blame Huey Lewis... he convinced us that it's Hip To Be Square.

 

I wish we were still just standard 4:3. Wide screen does not work well for comedies, it especially messed up BBC's Last of the Summer Wine.

Most, if not all progs i watch are 4:3. and i have a wide screen feed of our decoder hooked into my tv,so i then have to put "Wide mode" on for them not to be stretchd, which means normaly black bars top bottom and side, but it doesn't worry me at all.

 

In NZ, re-runs of The Simpsons still show that during the opening, and even show a dolby sourround (or stereo) logo.

Same with Re-runs of Married...With Children, hell, even the dvd's have them bits.

 

The answer to the question is that the industry failed to standardize after NTSC. The technology to go high def and revisit the 4:3 ratio was available by the early 1990s but there was no consensus on exactly what definition and ratio to use. Different display giants aligned with different technologies. Then the FCC got involved and another 10 years was wasted by government bureaucrats hashing it out. They turned out to be even more of a drag on the commercialization of HDTV than the bickering companies. That's why it bothers me so much when the industry can't decide on a format or even basic standards. They're begging the government to get involved and muck things up.

 

Mostly what GregM just posted, but I would put more weight on the broadcasters. They were not going to change until they either had economical reasons to do so (which they never did) or the FCC made them.

 

It does if it's shot that way. I've done many, many, many 1.85 movies that are still very funny in 16x9. And most American sitcoms were done in 16x9 going back to about 1995 or so.

The problem is the 700,000 hours' worth of old TV material that was shot in 4x3 before that. Not easy to fix those.

In 1998-1999, when the entire post-production business began (reluctantly) switching from standard def to HD, the joke we had was, "the beauty of high def is that it's 32 different standards in one!" There were literally 32 different combinations of available resolutions, frame rates, and aspect ratios. Very confusing. There were also several different HD videotape, compression, and file formats available, and that is still an issue to this very day.

The worst time was probably from 1999-2001, when we did a ton of work in 1080i. That had all the 2:3 problems of interlace (every third frame repeated a field), and all the challenges of more bandwidth and digital recording. Eventually, they worked out how to do 23.98 progressive, and we were finally able to get rid of interlaced. But it was not a smooth transition.

 

Reverse telecine was important back 10-12 years ago, because almost all widescreen content was film based. And since there were zero good chips that processed motion adaptive deinterlacing, or reverse telecine, the image on progressive displays was half-resolution, or full of jaggies.

Obviously reverse telecine is not necessary on native 1080i60 content (CBS HD Football). However, it's still important on 1080i60 content sourced from a 24p master, i.e. virtually all prime-time dramas/shows.

 

All the hotel widescreen TVs I have seen were broadcasting regular 4:3 cable stretched to fill the screen, with no way to un-stretch the picture. I would rather they just have an old CRT set in the room if that's how they're going to show programming.

 

I think things are getting a bit muddied here. I didn't mean to ask anything about HD. I just meant to ask why there wasn't a widescreen format for regular old SD, analog TV, even. Why wasn't the aspect ratio changed long before the advent of digital and/or HD? I get that you couldn't really watch films at home on your TV, but they could have begun shooting broadcast TV in widescreen.

 

So you're saying that the aspect ratio has harmed virtually every comedy movie made for the last 50 years?

 

Because it was cost prohibitive to make widescreen CRTs and RPTVs until recently. Why shoot Good Times in widescreen if the TV technology would never catch up to make affordable televisions?

 

My theory? I suspect it's because 1.33:1 was comforting. People went to movies for the grandeur and scope. They watched television to turn their minds off and spend some time with fictional friends. TV was comfort food for the longest time and it wasn't until they started making comedies without laugh tracks and single-camera sitcoms that the idea of TV being an art form started to take hold. Then HBO started to make serious dramas that rivalled films for being works of art instead of disposable entertainment. Then network TV show producers wanted their shows to have the sheen of serious art; widescreen was the simplest (and most cost-effective) way of informing their viewers that THIS show was to be taken more seriously than the fluff that other shows were peddling.

There wasn't a widescreen format for regular old SD for the same reason that there was always a laugh track on sitcoms; it was reassuring and comforting to the audience that was perceived to want the familiar.