letterboxed to 4:3, with a small amount of color noise in the black bars; this "noise" is actually the additional lines which are hidden inside the color signal. This system has no equivalent in analog NTSC broadcasting. Despite the existence of PALplus and support for widescreen in the DVB-based digital satellite, terrestrial and cable broadcasts in use across Europe, only Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, the Nordic countries and the UK have adopted widescreen on a large scale, with over half of all widescreen channels available by satellite in Europe targeting those areas. The UK, in particular, began moving to widescreen with the advent of digital terrestrial television in the late 1990s, and commercials were required to be delivered to broadcasters in widescreen as of 1 July 2000, on their widescreen "C-Day". Widescreen televisions are typically used in conjunction with Digital, High-Definition Television (HDTV) receivers, or Standard-Definition (SD) DVD players and other digital television sources. Digital material is provided to widescreen TVs either in high-definition format, which is natively 16:9 (1.78:1), or as an anamorphically-compressed standard-definition picture. Typically, devices decoding Digital Standard-Definition pictures can be programmed to provide anamorphic widescreen formatting, for 16:9 sets, and formatting for 4:3 sets. Pan-and-scan mode can be used on 4:3 if the producers of the material have included the necessary panning data; if this data is absent, letterboxing or centre cut-out is used. HD DVD and Blu-ray players were introduced in 2006. Toshiba ceased production of HD DVD players in early 2008. Consumer camcorders are also available in the HD-video format at fairly low prices. These developments will result in more options for viewing widescreen images on television monitors. See also Active Format Description (AFD) Anamorphic widescreen Aspect ratio (image) C-Day Cine 160 Full frame IMAX Letterboxing (filming) List of common resolutions List of film formats Motion picture terminology Open matte Pan and scan Ultrawide formats Virtual widescreen Widescreen display modes Widescreen signaling (WSS) References External links Official website for the American Widescreen Museum Reel Classics on What is Widescreen? Widescreen.org (formerly The Letterbox and Widescreen Advocacy Page) List of widescreen monitors compiled by TFT Central (incomplete) "The New Era of Screen Dimensions" by Bob Furmanek Film and video technology