why are tv’s always rectangular, but never round?
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The concept of TVs followed the concept of moving pictures on film. Film tends to be long and square, and consists of tough see-through stuff coated with expensive stuff. Film that has round pictures on it would either a) need to be coated in round patches and precisely aligned in the camera and projector, or b) be very wasteful since lot of the expensive stuff would go unused.
Lenses, as used for cameras and projectors, also natively create a round picture, and are more expensive to make the larger that round picture needs to be – BUT, lenses are not used up when filming, while film certainly is.
Early televisions actually were round because a picture tube is a glass vessel with a vacuum in it, and such a vessel is easiest to make sturdy if it is as round as possible. But the picture transmitted was always square (the tv either wasted some picture or some space on the screen), because a TV system transmits the picture line by line. The electronics to do that were already difficult to make in the early 20th century, and would have been even more difficult to make if the lines were not all the same length.
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