Not around here it isn't.

After the Doctor Who clip is finished, click on "Graham gets exterminated for spoiling Doctor Who" for a follow-up.

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i think its so close to the center because most ABC stations still air 4x3 programming in 4x3 (our fox station plays standard def programming in 1:78 windowboxed

LOL, I busted out laughing at that rabbit while watching OOAT. The first time he popped up (before he was in front of Snow), I thought he was a part of the show. I was like, WTF is that?

Some BBC research here. But my take on it is that they want to make piracy less attractive. Apparently it is all the fault of you merkins! TANGENT: it's all about prioritising one's expenditure, I agree.

I didn't buy a flatscreen/hd tv until about a year ago when I moved house and took the CRTs to the local tip. And even then we left it a few months until we (me and the S/O) had our respective birthdays in the same week. We survived using a portable and laptop in the interim.

Still not sure about the audio side but we picked up a bluray player that came with some home theatre wotsits. If truth be told, I take ages to choose pretty much ANY electrical item! I don't possess an mp3 player, a tablet or a smart-phone.

ONTOPIC: I hate intrusive onscreen station-idents. I think some people around my way call them DOGs - digital onscreen graphics. If the tv companies must "brand" as far as I am concerned they can do it immediately before after and during the adverts. The two main BBC channels very quickly gave in to public opinion and removed it, excusing themselves by saying that because of their position in the electronic programme guide it was inrinsically easier to know that you were watching BBC1 or BBC2. Hmmm.

Yeah I haven't gone TV shopping in years, but I went a few weekends ago and was shocked by the prices. You can get 1080p 55"+ screens for well under $1,000. Even a lot of the top end sets were under $2k. Almost made me upgrade but I don't use the current TV enough to justify it.

Even more annoying than the bugs for me is our local CBS affiliate's 'Storm Center' graphics. They come one whenever there's even a simple thunderstorm (about 50% of the summer) and the new one sits at the top of the frame and takes up about a quarter of the screen, so it was cutting off people's faces whenever there was a mid-to-long shot.

Reminds me of a problem I've been having recently regarding DVD subtitles.

I like to have the subtitles on whenever they're available, because I sometimes have trouble catching a lot of the dialogue.

I've been making my way through Elementary - Season 1, and it has nice big subtitles that are clearly meant to be easily readable on both HDTVs and SDTVs. They're fine.

Except when the credits are displayed early in an episode, and I guess they didn't want the subtitles blocking those names down at the bottom of the screen, so you get something that looks like this:



It often feels as if the person responsible for programming the subtitles is trying to be as obnoxious as possible, always putting them right on the faces of the actors or any object that may be relevant to the plot.

The problem disappears once the credits are done being displayed, but for that minute or so, I'm cursing those responsible for it.

I'm in the ad business and it's the same for tv spots. All type, logos, and supers have to be in an area of the screen called "title safe." Even though pretty much everything is now mastered in HD at 16:9, graphics are still catered to the lowest common denominator. As long as a marginally significant part of the audience has 4:3 TVs, titles and logos will be within a square in the center of the screen. Sucks.

Interesting- that's about the ONLY discussion I've seen anywhere about the effects of onscreen logos. This shit has been going on for FIFTEEN YEARS in the US now (and I know it's been even longer in some European countries) and it's disgusting that most people seem to be tolerating it, yet I've still heard of NOTHING that anybody has GAINED from it. (But I know they ARE used more to promote brand awareness and knowing what channel you're watching versus simply marking footage to keep it from being used elsewhere. There's tons of crap on YouTube recorded off the air with this stuff on, and it doesn't seem to do anything for anyone.) I won't watch a show with a logo on my screen, period, and if I produced a show I would not sell it to a network that ran it that way. Yes, I would rather be out several million dollars than have something I created desecrated that way- and I'm sure there's a few show producers out there right now who COULD get logos removed from their shows if they pushed hard enough. I see the Olympics symbol is back yet again on NBC- makes me hate the Olympics as well.

Keeping ANYTHING 4x3 safe is also retarded- people with 4x3 TVs using converter boxes should just keep them set to Letterbox or take whatever they get. I've seen some things obviously cropped on 4x3 standard-def stations here (which doesn't make a lot of sense as standard-def stations can still be flagged to display in 16x9 instead, but only a few do), but more often I see stuff in HD like the news where it's obvious they're putting stuff nobody cares about to the edges of the picture in case someone's watching it cropped- like they'll have the news anchors sitting near the center with dead space on the left and right.

Captions traditionally get moved to the top of the screen when credits are on, and yes it seems like they don't make any consideration for blocking out people's faces. I hope I never lose my hearing because it's annoying to watch stuff with those turned on- though I'm interested in how they do them and watch my movies at least once with them on, but when doing that I look more at the words and less at the actual picture.

This is one of my peeves.

The Fox sports channels are the worst.
There is always a scroll on the bottom and the scroll is the same three , maybe four bits of info.

Wgn Chicago does something that doesnt make sense, that being they add the scroll on the bottom and the rest of the image is squished together so everything becomes short and wide.

I used to work at a subtitling / translation company. There was a person who literally watches the entire movie / tv episode and flags sections that contain text at the bottom of the screen that would get covered by subtitles if not repositioned. (Text could be credits or something part of the scene like a critical newspaper headline.) of course, that guy was nicknamed the repo man.

Afterwards, the subtitle files and repo(sition) files were merged and the end result is what you see -- if at any time the subtitle was on screen during the repo timeframe it would be displayed at the top, even if the subtitle was displayed before the on-screen text.

And yes, absolutely no consideration is made to covering peoples faces for the reposition. It's more important to not have text on text.

Text crawls are another thing I hate- the local morning news shows here have them but they seem to keep them off at other times. What's really stupid is when they go to a commercial while the crawl is in the middle of a sentence and you never find out what it actually said! They really should have included graphics capabilities with digital TV as they do with Blu-Ray discs, so optionally stations could have text and graphics all over the screen but BE ABLE TO TURN THEM OFF if you actually wanted to watch the show! (Someone once commented that would be a dumb idea because nobody would willingly turn them on, but people willingly watch it forced on them.)

Huh?

Meaning that so many people tolerate on-screen crap, they wouldn't appreciate the chance to turn it off. If enough people had tuned out NBC saying "Why the fuck is the Olympics symbol on the screen during this show that has nothing to do with the Olympics??" then we wouldn't still have it 14 years later!

I've seen shows and sports broadcast with the stuff all the way in the corner. MSG sports I recall watching a hockey game last night where the score box thingy was all the way to the top left. Also my local Fox affiliate puts a solid colored logo box with blue and red in the bottom right corner. It sucks though considering it's freaking bright and not at all translucent. I find them all annoying though.

So your solution would be to not watch any channel that utilizes the bug? How's that working out for you?

It's working out great- have had much more free time, and most of the stuff I do watch has no commercials as well as no bugs. Still disgusts me that this shit has lasted as long as it has, and don't know a single positive thing it's done for broadcasters. The reason this pisses me off so much is that I once wanted to work in TV, and I would have walked off the job if I were told to put a bug on the screen. I remember when HDTV was the Holy Grail too, and when it finally became a reality they were intentionally defacing the picture. Compression on most digital stations is unacceptable anyways.

One of my favorites. Sorry I couldn't find it without sound effects or some guy talking over it.

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Looks like ABC has been doing THIS all week:


Halloween decorations around the bug, ALL THE TIME. The show promo on the left stayed on for at least as long as I was tuned in (several minutes) too- how the fuck does anyone actually WATCH shows like this??? And why do show producers remain silent about it? I wouldn't even allow some stupid clip shot by me on a cheap camera to be on "America's Funniest Home Videos" like this, much less something that I put an actual amount of work into!

Yeah, that was annoying -- so stupid since it serves no monetary purpose.

The worst is going to be when all the channels start running tickers.