> IMO, this was a non-story from day one.

Not quite a non-story though. It's garbage the film studios are giving bad copies to Netflix to stream. Bringing this up and complaining about it is a good first step to getting that fixed, right?

The studios should really have been suspect #1 in this case from the start. Doing Pan and Scan of 2 hours of film is a chunk of work - not just cropping, but reframing each and every scene to focus on the action. I don't know if Netflix have the resources for this, but would they have permission?

I can't find the story now, but there was an instance of a set of "widescreen" DVD releases (my memory tells me they were from WB) which were 4:3 cropped releases, cropped yet again to 16:9 aspect - a small chunk of the original picture left at this stage... but as I say, I can't find this story so I may be misremembering.

Replying to myself as the edit window has passed - still haven't tracked down that double-cropping story. The thought occurs, what happens with source material which fits no definition of "wide"? Older TV shows or many Kubrick films?

Horizontal black bars on screen to correct aspect are common, vertical black bars are less acceptable for whatever reason (Aesthetics? Acclimatisation? Who knows?). My xbmc setup not only has a hybrid stretch+crop for 4:3 stuff on my widescreen TV, it also has a setting which stretches more towards the edges than the centre of the picture. Acceptable presentation for my old TV recordings and such but if someone handed me a Dr. Strangelove recording distorted similarly, I'd be less than impressed. I prefer to ruin the presentation on my own terms!

Another mode I use for presentation of 4:3 material on the wide TV is 14:9 + crop - this is essentially a halfway-to-fullscreen zoom mode I use for my old game consoles. This has never, in my experience, cut out any relevant action or HUD info as these games needed to be designed for ludicrously variable CRT overscan in the first place.

The "story" is the fact that people aren't warned that they are watching a modified version of the film. Netflix is not at fault for showing what they get, but you could argue they are at fault for not informing customers of what they're showing.

This. I don't think people are necessarily expecting the literal Blu-Ray to be streamed, but even casual cinephiles (over a certain age anyway) probably expect to be notified if a film has been "formatted to fit [your] screen".

If read their response you'd know you're dead wrong.

Tl;dr for you: e get several formats and because we underpay or temp workers sometimes we upload the wrong one to some region, but we try to fix it fast if someone complains.

Reading what i type on the phone afterwards is painful

It is good it is fixed. Show it how it was filmed and framed. Still goofy for people to rage out hard on. Netflix is a great value and provides a great service cropping or not.

And their statement says that what they got was not what they expected.