What's the purpose of "fuzzovision letterboxing"?

[tripletopper]

I see a disturbing trend on a lot of tv stations and cable news channels.

Historically, it seems like Americans hate tgeir tv not being filled up.

That kind of thought was prevalent in the 90s about VHS and LD letterboxing.

The new version of this is what I call "Fuzzovision letterboxing". It's used when you have vertical cell phone video that is 9x16 or retro footage that is 4x3 presented on a news or sports channel typically 16x9.

For those unaware, they can opy the left and right sides, blur it, place it along the side borders instead of something else like black bars, white bars, grey bars, logo bars.

First why was black letterboxing chosen early? I thought it was that is was acting as a resource saver from the CRT days where anything non-black caused "consumption" of electricity.

Now I know Plasma is based on having white light and having gasses filter down to black. It's most active state is non-white pixels.

Then there is a technology that consumed upon "change of color". I think LCD, LED and TN displays are like that.

Since there is no one standard in terms of TV Economy, you'd pick the one most people are using. and that is black letterboxing. Mainly because both bright and dark pictures work well with it.

But why did stations choose Fuzzovision? If you're going to pick one standard, it's either black letterboxing or white letterboxing. Definitely nothing that is animated.

Yet the news and sports always decide to have a blurred repeat of the left and right edges? Why?

What is the purpose of Fuzzovision? Why do certain institutions use it? It saves no tv resources, it's distracting, it's unclear to the unaware what the picture is exactly. What was the reason for Fuzzovision. Letterboxing?

Doesn't that also distract from the video itself?

Or do Anericans have sort of vain glory fetish where all of the picture has to be running for all times?

Does this happen anywhere else in the world, or is it just for us in the States?