Broadcast TV format question

What's likely happening is that the broadcast is adding the top and bottom borders, because the broadcast is in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the program is a wide-screen format like 16:9 or whatever. Then your wide-screen TV takes the

Dig through your TV's menus to see if any combination of its zoom and aspect ratio options helps.

That would be the expected case if the broadcast itself didn't have the black bars embedded in the video.

not enough pixels in the video?

That's a 16:9 program reduced and padded to 4:3 (top bars) and then reduced and padded again to 16:9 (side bars). Sometimes PBS will run it through that cycle twice and transmit it at 640x480i to make sure that it's completely destroyed.

Digital TV's have a "zoom" mode to get rid of the padding caused by cyclic conversion. Some TVs, like Panasonic, have upscaling and de-interlacing bugs while zoomed so it may look worse.

Digital TV's may have zoom, but Usenet has digital echo.

Wipe froth off

Extremely severe multipath, to be exact. There's little coordination and propagation latency varies from milliseconds to days.

PBS now has many programs that are in various wide-screen formats. If your set can't (or isn't set to) handle such formats, you get the "border". ...Jim Thompson

Enquiring minds want to know... why? I know that "classic" programs need to be broadcast as-is (not re-mastered, whatever that means) for broadcast on DTV, but why do new (in the pass few years) programs take on this same look? Even "live" programs (ie, Nightly News program).