ESPN Goes Widescreen

[Geoffrey 863]

I noticed within the last few weeks, ESPN's SD feed switched to a letterboxed format. I'm watching Sunday Night Baseball and it's the first time I've noticed that they moved the graphics over to take advantage of the extra space. The scorebug is now pushed over to the right and lower-thirds can be displayed at the same time (previously, the score had to disappear while the lower-thirds popped up). I'm pretty sure this wasn't the case last Sunday night.

 

I haven't noticed any other programs filling the extra space just yet but I might have missed it.

[trev57 46]

ESPN has been letterboxed here in the Milwaukee area for at least the past few months.

[ColumbusNewsFan 217]

I notice about two or three month ago as well and Time Warner a couple weeks ago switched to the widescreen ESPN.

 

I like it!

[Spring Rubber 705]

I read that this was a gradual rollout that culminated at the end of last month, at which point every provider had to start presenting ESPN SD in letterboxed format. I think all ESPN programming from this point forward is going to be specialized for 16:9. This helps ESPN, like you said, when it comes to presenting lower thirds and their score graphic at the same time. It also helps them for showing highlights of other networks' broadcasts that are already specialized for 16:9. To this point, when they showed highlights where the other networks' score box was outside the safe area, they would add a single pillar box on the left side of the screen and push the video over to the right so that 4:3 viewers could see the entire score box. Now that ESPN is doing 16:9 only, they should be able to put an end to this practice.