Hi, I have noticed the NHK World Newsline program on WNED has the image cut off on both sides and always missing a few letters. No other show on that channel or any other channel presents the picture cut off with missing characters on both sides on any other channel though. Does anyone know why?. It looks WNED or PBS intend to present the picture that way instead of letterboxed for instance. Any help is appreciated. Thx.

Well , they finally fixed it. I had emailed on Thursday to the VP of Engineering at WNED but I got a VACATION auto-repliy saying was out of office till Monday. And yes , this afternoon , Mr Puma replied my email which I will post here and now I can see on the Asia Insight show that the picture has been properly fixed now. Now it whos ll originally present characters on screen. It is still an SD 4/3 presentation on WNED 17.1 but it is properly presented now. NHK Newsline show comes next but I am sure now it is also fixed the issue as it seem both show suffered the same problem.

Here is the response I got earlier today from WNED.

Thanks for your concern and taking the time to write. This problem actually stems from the public TV service that distributes the program. The only satellite feed that fits our playout schedule is transmitted in widescreen 16x9 SD, even though the program is produced by NHK in HD. The problem lies in the data associated with the satellite transmission, which lists the program as 4x3 SD. The satellite record-to-playout system at the PBS Hub in Syracuse NY is fully automated and does what it is told, chopping the sides off the 16x9 transmission to produce 4x3, which is the default presentation for an SD program.

This is simply human error at the data insertion point, leaving the default value in place where it should be changed to 16x9 full frame. We have contacted them and have been assured that it will be fixed. However, as of this writing early Monday afternoon it is still listed as 4x3. We will contact them once again. We also discovered that the program Asia Insight, distributed by the same organization, suffers from the same problem.

Thanks once again for contacting us!

Best regards,

-Joe

Just an update. Finally the NHK Newsline program on WNED is in HD !, I suppose on Monday the show Asia Insight will equally be in HD since both are supplied to WNED by APT or American Public Television , a content provider of public TV. No all characters show properly on the screen as originally produced by NHK in HD from Tokyo.

As at today (Feb 19 2020), both the NHK Newsline and the Asia Insight programs are still presented in 4:3 format on both SD and HD channels for WNED.