AHC: Widescreen TV Adopted Earlier

Pulling the public into accepting widescreen for the home market was like pulling teeth and took eons, and the dumbness of their refusal is frustrating in 20/20. My history lesson will follow:

As a short history lesson, widescreen really began when movies needed something to put them over the new format of television. That something was widescreen, where you'd see the wide picture like your eye's own vision, and weren't subject to a square. TV still was only that square, and that's the way it stayed for a very, very long time with widescreen in movies but standard full screen for TV.
That also affect anything that came on TV. TV shows obviously were that dimension, but films were also forced to be edited, and not just by cutting off the sides, but by the process of pan-and-scan where they cut off areas, and then moved focus along with whatever was moving in the scene (watch a TV edit of Ghostbusters and it's terrible and artificial). This also affected VHS releases, which were 99% fullscreen, and I don't remember seeing widescreen until DVD.

Widescreen finally came to TV with the DVD age (it may have been in Laserdisc; I don't know) and the increased popularity of widescreen DVDs really seems to have been what did it. It was like pulling teeth, though, because the public would not for the longest time accept those black bars and it took forever for fullscreen DVD to just finally die off.
Following that, widescreen TV's came into being to fit that new spectrum, and we entered into this age of HD, biggest picture, experience everything to perfection.

EDIT:
Oh, and another thing, after a while, theatrical films were being directed with scenes set up in a way where the focus of a scene was such that for TV and later home video they could cut off areas to fit it in the 4x3 television format. So there's that.

So the challenge here is to get widescreen television into existence and popularity earlier. The media innovations that surrounded it in the OTL will most likely surround it in such a scenario as well (widescreen VHS instead of DVD, TV shows shot for widescreen, and so forth). It'd also be interesting to discuss the ramifications of such a thing, one of which will be the studios losing an advantage they had over TV for a long time.
 
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There is the matter of broadcast standards and backwards compatibility. I don't think the switch can be done once analog TV standards are in place and before digital TV comes into play.
I guess the safest, and boring, bet is to have movies to be originally in 16:9 instead of 4:3. So, when TV is invented, it's designed as 16:9. Maybe that also means TV channels require a bit more bandwidth (so one or two less channels are technically possible), or TV looks a bit worse.
Movies would then have to invent something else, or further stretch the image. So, we may end up with the ATL dvds coming and the TV industry slowly switching to 21:9 or something.
 
the whole TV standards and integration of Film standards wit TV standards is a bit of a nightmare

4:3 or 'square' picture tubes for CRT TV are probably much easier to produce and also require less ability to deviate the electron beam

film had adopted 24 fps so the timing issues are far less of an issue with a 50 Hz mains than with a 60 Hz mains , as 24/25 = 0.96 to showing a 24 fps film at 50 images per second is a 4% speed change

also given film had adopted 35 mm as a standard it will take a major change or reason to want 'wide screen' for cinema and by extension for TV, you would need a far earlier adoption of a wide screen wet film format and even then there is no assurances that it would translate to TV until the dawn of the video age ...
 
Former Panasonic employee here (at around the time of the great DVD revolution). Zippy has pretty much covered off the important parts. 4:3 tubes were a lot easier to manufacture to an acceptable standard.

As an aside I seem to recollect that at the time I was working there, plasma screens had something in the area of an 80-90% QA failure rate. These days I am told it's more like 0.08%. Amazing what a decade of pracitice can do...
 
Well, the Japanese, under the direction of MITI, had been working on analog hi-definition broadcasting since the late 60s, both to advance the related technologies as well as provide a window to abandon the NTSC television standard, which apparently the engineers hated for its limitations. The "Hi-Vision" standard was supposed to be more like film aspect ratio as well. If you could somehow get the US government and the broadcasters on board, you might have a shot at moving to Widescreen earlier, during the analog era. It wouldn't be until like the late 80s/early 90s that it would be commercially viable, and it would still be expensive. But it'd be the hot new thing.

They also developed Laserdiscs to take advantage of the format, which were highly prized imports among Laserdisc collectors in the US. It could be an elite thing, with serious videophiles and those with the disposable income for obscene conspicuous consumption, while other manufacturers might make standard def widescreen TVs to ride on their coattails.
 
Well, the Japanese, under the direction of MITI, had been working on analog hi-definition broadcasting since the late 60s, both to advance the related technologies as well as provide a window to abandon the NTSC television standard, which apparently the engineers hated for its limitations. The "Hi-Vision" standard was supposed to be more like film aspect ratio as well. If you could somehow get the US government and the broadcasters on board, you might have a shot at moving to Widescreen earlier, during the analog era. It wouldn't be until like the late 80s/early 90s that it would be commercially viable, and it would still be expensive. But it'd be the hot new thing.
Wouldn't that require more bandwidth? And thus, creating the problem of having to reduce the amount of channels and, in places with plenty of them, potentially having to get some out of the air?
 
Wouldn't that require more bandwidth? And thus, creating the problem of having to reduce the amount of channels and, in places with plenty of them, potentially having to get some out of the air?
They actually used a form of analog signal compression, called MUSE (Multiple sub-Nyquist sampling encoding). I believe in the end it took up more of the band than NTSC broadcast, but not a huge amount more.
 
The easiest way to do it early on would be to change the aspect ratio of the picture, which is actually easier that it sounds. When the United Kingdom introduced the 405-line TV system back in the 1930s, the original aspect was 5:4, which is just slightly bigger than what is used for Super 16 mm film. As you can tell, the 5:4 aspect ratio is wider than the OTL conventional 4:3 aspect ratio. So making the 5:4 aspect ratio standard for TV early on would get you your widescreen TV early on as standard equipment.
 
John Logie Baird's 600 line colour TV (demonstrated 1944) is adopted by Marconi in 1945, though not released until several years later, by say 1949. With the coronation in 1953 driving 'Joneses' competitiveness, more than 100,000 sets are sold in the lead-up, which drives a big post-coronation market for programs that can take full advantage of the new sets.
 
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