The stream fills the screen
For weeks the 24/7 stream played inside a small box of black bars — bars above, bars beside, on every viewer, on every phone that refused to rotate. The game underneath was always widescreen. Now the picture finally is too: full frame, edge to edge, the Brick Sea the size it's meant to be.
Boxed in on every screen
If you'd dropped in on the round-the-clock channel any time recently, you saw a stamp-sized square of Warbirds floating in a sea of black. It was worst on a phone: turn the handset sideways to fill the screen and the video refused to follow, leaving the war stranded in a little tile in the middle while the black borders ate everything around it.
Nothing about the game was actually square. The dogfights, the fleet actions, the tank duels on the steppe were all being filmed in proper widescreen the whole time — the sky touched the top of frame, the sea touched the bottom. Somewhere between the camera and your player, that widescreen picture was getting crushed into a box and then surrounded with bars on all four sides.
Widescreen again
It's fixed. The stream now goes out in true 16:9, the same shape as the game and the same shape as your screen. Open the channel and the war fills the frame — horizon to horizon, no letterbox, no pillarbox, none of the wasted black that used to swallow three-quarters of the picture.
Phones get the biggest win: rotate to landscape and the video finally snaps to fill the whole display, the way any other video does. The square picture had been quietly convincing mobile players the footage wasn't landscape at all; now a Barnstormer Bess flyby or a Paladin brewing up on the steppe reads at full size in your hand.
Watching out loud
While we were in there, the stream got tougher, too. When it used to drop, it dropped quietly — the picture would freeze or vanish and nothing would say why. Now the broadcast checks its own pulse and shouts the moment it can't go out, so a hiccup gets caught and cleared in minutes instead of sitting dead on the channel. The 24/7 stream is meant to always be on; now it does a much better job of actually staying that way.