what about us normal people with regular TVs
I’m not rich enough to buy a widescreen TV
I say either move the scoreboard to a normal position or buy me a better TV
Fox only wants you to see the right side of things.
Call your local station and bitch. They should fix it up.
I’ve seen them do that in a lot of different locations. It’s not every game though.
This was my complaint, too - we went and bought a new tv. Hello, consumerism.
when there was a weather advisory on screen they switched it to the game being in widescreen and I could see the score
then when the advisory left they went back to fullscreen and I couldn’t see anything again
when FOX started broadcasting games in widescreen at the beginning of this year I saw it in widescreen but now they are showing it in full screen. I assume too many people called the station to bitch about the black lines at the top of the screen
Comcast cable over here broadcasts on 2 channels - one for a regular signal and one for HD. The HD version looks the same on my non-HD TV, but it has a better screen ratio, so I can see the full screen.
So that’s what I watch.
I wish I could try that but alas you gotta have a fancy cable box to see both the regular and HD channels
Better than around here, where many stations, the PBS station being the worst offender, broadcast a 16:9 display inside a 4:3 box inside a 16:9 signal. A show will appear letterboxed to those with older analog 4:3 sets on cable, and surrounded by a large black frame for the 16:9 digital viewers.
My guess for the 16:9-in-4:3-in-16:9 phenomenon: the region tends to be several years behind the curve when it comes to culture and tech, and a very large percentage of area residents are seniors and elderly. Every local commercial and all but one of the local newscasts here is 4:3, too.
You don’t have a regular TV anymore.
If you don’t have the money to afford a wide-screen TV (it’s like $150 or $200, come on), then you’ll have to do without vital necessities like the Fox NFL widget. For that, I am truly sorry.
At my old job, they had a widescreen HDTV in the break room, but we didn’t get the HD broadcast of FOX. The score was still cut off on the left side. It’s not the TV, it’s the broadcast.
How can you not get the HD broadcast of Fox? Doesn’t every Fox network have an HD feed nowadays? And if you get an HD antenna (like $50) you can get that HD feed.
My complaint is the opposite. Here in Canada, when I watch sports the networks always put the bug in the middle of my HDTV instead of off to the side where it’d be out of the way.
Is it really that hard to put the bug in different places on HD and SD broadcasts?
I have had a similar complaint. The other complaint I have is the scores from the other games are so damn small I can’t see them. I assume the HD viewers can see the scores? Because I sure as hell can’t, and neither can anyone else in my house.
I am not a fan of HD. It hurts my eyes to watch. I know that everything will be HD one day soon, but until then, I’m going to try to enjoy tv without the HD option.
Didn’t anyone else think this was a perfect response? 
Still could be the TV…a lot of people change an HDTV’s display setting to “stretch” or “fill,” which attempts to fit the SD broadcast to the whole width of the TV. Sometimes it goes too far and cuts things off.
Nope. I would always switch through the different displays. I could even switch it to the full version, which would have black bars on the side and the score cut off.
Last night, on the non-HD broadcast of the Packers game, the score was not cut off. Just now, watching on the highlights on non-HD Sportscenter, the score was cut off, in the exact same way I’ve seen it cut off before. So it’s what feed everyone is getting, not the TV.
As the average TV screen gets bigger, producers make the graphics smaller so that they take up less screen real estate. Those with smaller TVs then end up being unable to read the graphics. I already experienced this issue years ago when playing PS2 games on a fairly small TV (13 inches?). Some of the numbers ended up looking nearly identical.
As far as I’m aware, all standard definition tvs have the same number off pixels, it’s just that bigger tvs have bigger pixels. Provided you sit the proper distance away from the tv based on its size, text on a 13" is just as readable as text on a 42" screen.
When Fox shows the scores of other games in the top right of the screen, there aren’t enough pixels on a standard definition tv to make the characters legible unless you get right up next to it, like a couple inches away. It’s really annoying. No doubt it’s clear on an HD set.
When I watch the FOX games on my HDTV it looks fine. When I watch them on my old TV on the non-HD FOX, then I can’t see the visiting team’s score. Why they don’t put the score in the top center of the screen is beyond me.
The other thing that irritates me is that when the local news (which is not HD) runs their sports highlights, they start out with a passable non-HD picture. But then they decide they want to put the scores of all the games on a crawl at the bottom of the screen. Do they merely overlay the scores over the lower 10% of the screen? No, that would be too easy. What they do is compress the vertical dimension by 10% and put the crawl below the visual part of the screen. This makes everything distorted in the H/W ratio. It’s especially bad when they do it while showing highlights of girls basketball. Every girls team has one girl that’s built like a tank, but when they pull this stunt ALL the girls look like they’re tanks.