We had the perfect opportunity to dump it into the wastebin of history when TVs switched to HD, but for some damn reason the industry decided to carry it forward.
Provisioning for overscan on 1080i CRTs seems just as valuable as with 480i CRTs.
People want content to the edge of the screen, but not to pay a TV technician to come and calibrate their tube to exacting standards in their home. Content creators need to know that some of their broadcast is invisible to some of their viewers as a result.
Pixel perfect tvs came later, so the transiton to HD wasn't the right time. ATSC3 could have been a reasonable time to change, but then broadcasters couldn't use the same feed for ATSC1 and ATSC3 ... and who knows if ATSC3 will ever win over ATSC1, or if all the OTA TV spectrum will be refarmed to telcos before that happens.
You would be surprised how many movies on dvd/bluray have junk in the margins. Usually just a line or an overscan of the audio track. But a lot of them have it.
I turn off overscan as those artifacts do not bother me.
Sometimes you can see the closed captions line of the NTSC signal at the top of the frame of the video when watching an old show converted to digital from an NTSC source. It looks like a single line of black and white dashes which dances around quickly every time the onscreen captions would have changed and then sits static until the captions update again.
