It has taken seven months for Disney to restore the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the first twenty seasons of “The Simpsons” on the Disney+ service.
When the SVOD service launched last November, it was met with immediate backlash as older pre-HD episodes were cropped to fit into a 16-by-9 frame, killing numerous visual jokes and resulting in poorer quality.
Disney pledged to restore the classic episodes to their proper 4:3 aspect-ratio, but they’ve only just premiered those episodes today – viewers now have the option to toggle between both versions via a switch in the ‘Details’ section of the show’s entry page.
So why did it take so long? Joe Rice, VP of media product at Disney Streaming Services, says the team had to basically reconfigure their whole content-delivery engine and insert a brand-new feature to accommodate the ability for viewers to access the same content but with different underlying video attributes – and do so without breaking any of the existing features of the service.
The new 4:3 versions also reportedly couldn’t be treated as standalone, bonus content so the team had to allow for different combinations of content delivery – resulting in the episodes being able to use the same audio, subtitles and metadata information but utilise a different video component.
The installation of this model reportedly allows “a number of exciting opportunities for novel ways of presenting content in the future”.
Source: Variety
