Although a channel may be an HD channel, not necessarily all the programming will be in HD. This is typically the case with commercials. You''ll notice that shows that are not in HD have black bars, called pillar bars, on the left and right of the picture. This is a smaller image, made to fit a 4:3 screen. HD picture quality is formatted to fit a 16:9 screen and again will fill out the entire screen on your TV. There may also be times where there will be black bars on all four sides of an image on your HD TV. This occurs when a commercial or a program is shot in what is referred to as letter box and is intended for a 4:3 screen. BendBroadband has no control over the programming on HD channels, so we cannot control the picture size. As technology advances, more channels switch to HD and high definition TVs become more common, programmers will air more programming in the 16:9 size format.