Annoyingly, my TV won't let you turn it /off/. Not only that, but it won't accept it's own panel's native resolution of 1366x768, only 1280x720 which it then scales up to crop off a bunch of pixels. It's like they were dedicated to making a 720p television look like blurry bigfoot butt.
And this is the true irony of the persistence of title-safe areas: Broadcast switched over to digital nearly a decade ago, analog set-top boxes haven't been produced in large quantities in years, and thus the concept of overscan should be completely dead by now.
Yet TV manufacturers, for some reason I cannot wrap my mind around, continue to implement it, often by default (or in the extreme case, as you mention, with no way to disable it). And so title-safe areas continue to be an issue long after the obsolescence of the technology they were invented to work within.
