What's up with Al Jazeera?

Al Jazeera English, which can be viewed at 97W on Ku-band FTA, had been broadcasting a letterboxed stretched image for a few days. This was apparently just an oversight and was corrected pretty quickly.

They do it to themselves. Why?

Some people are stuck with a distorted picture on their TV. The worst part about it is that they are choosing to do it to themselves. For the true TV fanatic such as myself it can almost literally cause pain to see this happen.

This particular variety of Stretch-O-Vision is not caused by bad signal or stupid decisions at the programming source. It is caused, on purpose, by the viewer. Every time they see an image with blackness on the left and right sides, they reach for the remote and press the format button until the image stretches and the sidebars go away. They do this instinctively and instantly. For example, if while watching a 16x9 HD program, a 4x3 commercial comes on, the image must be stretched to fill the screen (and it must be done quickly or else something "bad" will happen?), then they obliviously watch the rest of the program stretched and with the sides cut off. The worst of all is if something comes on from a 4x3 source, letterboxed. They'll happily watch everything zoomed and stretched from that point on.

Whenever I have encountered one of these situations, I have explained the concept of "Original Aspect Ratio" in as many ways as I can think of. If I show them the actual images, they even agree that the unstretched one looks better. But still the instinct takes over every time.

For some people the clarity and quality of the image they are seeing is important. For others, it is more important that every pixel on the screen be in use, even though that "use" is to produce a blurry, distorted picture.