Fox News widescreen?

Not usually my channel of choice, but just noticed something odd on Fox News (yeah, nothing new there!). It's currently broadcasting pillarboxed, with ticker across the width of the screen and the logo cube thing overlapping the edge of the pillarboxed frame.

Either something's gone a bit wrong, or this is the first step towards them going widescreen. Apparently they're going HD this year.

Well last year they refitted a couple of studios (E+F?), one of these was given as a little pressie to FBN when it launched which meant that more programs ending up coming from the Fox&Friends studio (albeit a different area of the set). The Fox Report also has a new studio and set (introduced last September) which has a very snazzy news-wall in it. That I remember cost a bomb so I'd suspect that they would have kitted it out for HD.

Fox News Sunday is also produced in 16:9 SD and has been for a while - and is upconverted to 16:9 HD for broadcast on the Fox Network (not Fox News Channel).

It is expected that Fox News Channel will shift to HD sometime in the next 12 months.

Slightly off topic, BUT, Looking at the table below, I take it most films are shown in one of the two bottom formats as I have a wide-screen TV but get the pillar box when watching films?
http://i31.tinypic.com/2drw00i.png

Back to normal now so it seems like it was a glitch (it was broadcasting like this for at least an hour.)

Capture card isn't working at the mo, so here's an idea of how it looked when the picture was stretched across a 16:9 screen (I don't know whether it had a 16:9flag, I was watcing on my HD box so I don't get auto aspect ratio switching):

http://www.rp-network.com/tvforum/uploads/fn.jpg

White area is the picture, which was in the correct ratio when viewed like this (and would have looked squashed in 4:3), red is the lower third and blue is the logo.

Sounds like some work is being done on a 16:9 (probably HD) presentation area - and we temporarily got a 16:9 HD to 16:9 SD downconversion rather than 16:9 HD to 4:3 SD feed. (Hence tall and thin people in 4:3)

Whether we get a 16:9 SD feed when they switch to HD in the US who knows.

Think you mean letterbox (i.e. black bars top and bottom) not pillarbo (i.e. black bars left and right).

Many films are made in a wider ratio than 16:9 - so if transferred in "original aspect ratio" rather than "full frame" / "pan and scan" they will have black bars top and bottom to fill the 16:9 frame.