Why do you show some movies with a black strip at the top and bottom?

Over the years, movies have been made in many different formats, with the ratio between the top-to-bottom and left-to-right dimensions varying considerably. A standard television screen is about the same aspect ratio as the classic ‘Academy’ cinema ratio which was the standard until the introduction of CinemaScope in 1953. Then came the ‘European’ widescreen and the ‘American’ widescreen, each with a wider shape than the standard television screen. Other networks solve the problem by cropping each side of the image and enlarging it, so that there is no black at the top and bottom. But this means that a good deal of the original movie frame, on the extreme left and right, is lost. We feel this is an unwarranted interference in the film’s creative integrity and so we show as much of the left-right image as possible, resulting in a black strip at the top and the bottom. This is a process called ‘letterboxing’. One advantage is we can run the subtitles in the black area beneath the image, thus keeping the entire movie image clear of text.