Poor picture viewing analog stations on HDTV

[Slickone]

Why do analog stations look so bad on HDTVs? A friend of mine has a Panasonic wide screen RPTV, not sure the size, looks like about 50". He has digital cable but the analog channels look very fuzzy. They also fill the entire screen. Regular programming shouldn't be filling a 16x9 screen should they? I was thinking the TV or digital cable box is rescaling the picture to make it fill the screen, which makes it look pixelated? Or else, if the broadcasts are already 16x9, maybe the bad picture is because it's up converting (scaling?) the # of lines to HD resolution. Either way, does that mean the scaler is not good? Should there be a way to make the TV not do this?
I recorded a VH1 Behind the Music there, and when I played it back at home on my 25" SDTV, while it was a little fuzzy, it looked a lot better than it did on his TV. I contribute that to the fact that it seems everyone has a fuzzy cable TV (analog) picture now. I do, my parents do, he does. We all have Comcast.

Also, I had to record it by connecting my VCR via coax cable into his Comcast dig. cable box. When we connected it via RCA to the composite video out (no it wasn't component) from his TV, it only recorded a black picture with a few white horizontal/diagonal flashing lines (like lightning, LOL). What caused that?

This says the same thing.

This says "virtually all broadcast television produced today is in 16x9 widescreen". Though it's an Australian website.

 

[nullpointerus]

Analog stations are that bad. Due to interlacing on older TVs, you just didn't notice it as much. But with the newer TVs having a fixed native resolution AND upscaling the old analog TV, it looks downright terrible. One way to get around this is to build a HTPC using a high-quality video decoder (ffdshow?), but IMO it's still going to look bad. I'm sure someone else can add something to this...