Wife and I always watch the Lawrence Welk show on PBS on Sunday nights. Time Warner here recently took to the HD changeover, and instead of the channels being unwatchable on analog sets, they're actually framed much better for analog sets......at least for the time being. On older shows that are in non-HD format, they put the black bars on the sides of the screen instead of top and bottom. Seems they stopped rearranging the picture to a wide aspect ratio.
Interestingly enough, with the black bars on the sides of the screen (and station logos placed in those bars on the sides in a relief tone in a similar color on some channels), the picture is just horrendously annoying. Whether this will change again and the picture eventually be totally unavailable for analog remains to be seen.
My wife said to me "we might have to get one of those old color sets up here for Sunday nights, this is just annoying"
Now of course I could play with the picture settings for each channel and broadcast that's like that, but that's a huge PITA.....