I asked why they don't make any TVs with ratios greater than 16:9 to accommodate cinema ratios so that you don't get a letterbox view that you still may get on a 16:9 set.
AH! Now I understand what you were asking. Your original wording didn't convey that question to me at all. It's worth noting that movies have been produced in a variety of aspect ratios, including CinemaScope (2.66:1) and Cinerama (ratio varied from 2.89:1 to 3:1). I became curious about the answer, because I thought I should have known.
Your answer was found by doing a quick internet search for "history of 16:9 TV ratio." Here it is:
In 1983, the International Telecommunication Union's radio telecommunications sector (ITU-R) set up a working party (IWP11/6) with the aim of setting a single international HDTV standard. [snip] While a comprehensive HDTV standard was not in the end established, agreement on the aspect ratio was achieved.
Initially the existing 5:3 aspect ratio had been the main candidate, but due to the influence of widescreen cinema, the aspect ratio 16:9 (1.78) eventually emerged as being a reasonable compromise between 5:3 (1.67) and the common 1.85 widescreen cinema format. (It has been suggested that the 16:9 ratio was chosen as being the geometric mean of 4:3, Academy ratio, and 2.35:1, the widest cinema format in common use, in order to minimize wasted screen space when displaying content with a variety of aspect ratios.)
An aspect ratio of 16:9 was duly agreed at the first meeting of the WP at the BBC's R & D establishment in Kingswood Warren. The resulting ITU-R Recommendation ITU-R BT.709-2 ("Rec. 709") includes the 16:9 aspect ratio, a specified colorimetry, and the scan modes 1080i (1,080 actively-interlaced lines of resolution) and 1080p (1,080 progressively-scanned lines). The current BBC freeview trials of HD use MBAFF, which contains both progressive and interlaced content in the same encoding.
It also includes the alternative 1440 x 1152 HDMAC scan format. (According to some reports, a mooted 720p format (720 progressively-scanned lines) was viewed by some at the ITU as an "enhanced" television format rather than a true HDTV format,[8] and so was not included, although 1920x1080 and 1280x720p systems for a range of frame and field rates were defined by several US SMPTE standards.)
Found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_television
And as Uncle Walter useta say "That's the way it is."
Plus more and more shows are going to letterbox format.
