system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why did it take so long for TV's to adopt the 16:9 format?
gpt
**TLDR: (1) There's no reason to own a 16:9 TV if there is no 16:9 content available to watch on it. (2) Only a small minority actually care about widescreen.**

The first 16:9 TVs were made in the early 90s, but very few were sold, because (1) they were incredibly expensive, and (2) there was very little 16:9 content to watch on them.

There were a few anamorphic Laserdiscs that were specifically designed to work on 16:9 TVs. However, Laserdiscs were a very niche market to begin with, and anamorphic discs were even rarer because they could not display properly on a 4:3 TV.

Meanwhile, 99% of us were watching movies on VHS, which were only capable of displaying a 4:3 image. There were "widescreen edition" VHS tapes available, but the image was still 4:3, just letterboxed with black bars at the top and bottom. If you were to play one of these letterboxed tapes on a 16:9 TV, it would look terrible because you would have black bars on all four sides.

(It's also worth noting that "widescreen edition" tapes appealed only to cinephiles who wanted to watch movies in their original aspect ratio. Joe Public *hated* them, because he wanted the image to fill his TV screen without any black bars. There was therefore only a limited selection of letterboxed movies available, relegated to a special section of the store.)

Things started to change once with the advent of DVDs. DVDs differed from previous technology, because the same disc could be displayed in different ways: it could fill up a 16:9 screen at full resolution; it could display a letterboxed picture on a 4:3 screen, or it could display a "black-bars-free" 4:3 image to keep Joe Public happy.

Suddenly, every movie you bought in the store could be played in 16:9, without having to buy a special "widescreen" edition. This increased the desire for 16:9 TVs amongst those who cared about watching movies in the original aspect ratio, therefore gradually making them more affordable. Joe Public, meanwhile, would stay happy with his 4:3 screen.

Much like VHS, analogue TV signals could only support a 4:3 picture. It was not until digital broadcasting was rolled out, that a TV signal could be broadcast in 16:9. Much like a DVD player, a digital TV receiver would adapt the image to display properly on whatever shape TV you had.

Once digital broadcasting became available, all of our viewing content was now available in a 16:9 format. At this point, TV manufacturers decided that there was no good reason to continue manufacturing 4:3 TVs.

Coincidentally, this is about the same time that flat-screen technology was becoming more widespread. Joe Public had spent years not caring about widescreen. But what he did want was a flat screen! And well, it just so happened that they were only being manufactured in 16:9! And that was the final nail in the coffin for 4:3.