Broadcast Context Dater
You saw it on TV, and that tells us more than you think.
Where and when a film reached you narrows it sharply. Broadcast slots, channel type and the state of the print all carry information about the film’s age, origin and certification.
What a broadcast slot tells you
Television scheduling is not random. Slots have always been matched to certification, audience and licensing cost, and each of those correlates with a film’s age and origin.
Cheap slots ran old films
Sunday afternoons and small local channels ran library titles because the rights were cheap. If you saw it there, the film was probably a decade or more old at the time.
The print tells you about the transfer
Pan-and-scan cropping means a widescreen film mangled for a square screen — standard until the late 1990s. Letterboxing on television is a later habit.
Aspect ratio terms are explained in the glossary.
Remember what happened in it?
Combine the broadcast clues with the scene itself.
Try the scene finder