Why no The Simpsons on E4?

No it was an older episode, I remember it being from one of the early series. When they showed the news on the TV the TV was in 4:3 with black bars.

Pretty sure Channel 4 are now inflicting the cropped 'remastered' episodes on us.

In the "remastered" Simpsons of older episodes the close-up of the Simpsons TV is pretty much the only bit of the entire thing that's in its original format. Presumably they couldn't do that without chopping all the action out.

For anybody who can't see what the issue is, have a look at this (sourced from Reddit) comparison of some shots between the original and the remastered and you'll see just how much picture you're losing:
https://imgur.com/a/FOPr9

And then there's this other example (from theverge.com) which seems to suggest more than cropping has gone on here, considering Lisa is closer to the poster in the cropped version than she is in the original:
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/667498/simpsons-fxx-crop.0.gif

I think they've just failed to compare exactly the same frame. Lisa walks in from the right as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IUxK_0WLbg

What's sad is I've seen commentators on YouTube say they prefer the "remastered" versions because they don't like watching stretched or pillar-boxed episodes. I struggle to see how either of those are worse than losing a significant portion of the picture.

Yeah, pillar boxing is the best solution.

Even that one of Lisa shows how awful the remastered episodes are- it cuts off the top banner on Nelson's wall. Loads of visual gags like that are lost throughout the course of the show's run, one of those things that makes you wonder how the hell anyone wrote them off as acceptable.

I expect it might be the former - I've also seen those HD copies broadcast on Australian, Belgian and New Zealand channels, among others.

I suppose it's one way to boost DVD sales.

Well I've certainly been thinking of buying the DVDs recently as a result of it. Before now I never saw the need seeing as it's endlessly repeated.

The only other temptation for me is the special features and the audio commentary, as I find it really interesting hearing stories about the production of each episode. But I've recently obliterated most of my DVD collection so it'd be a bit silly to start buying box sets again.

That's another thing about online streaming and downloads, they tend not to have the features or commentaries, another reason I'm reluctant to replace DVDs & Blu-Rays with them.

The audio commentaries for early Simpsons at least are available online, people tend to rip and dump them on various outlets like Tumblr and what not.

The only thing about audio commentaries and special features in my own personal opinion (this is not limited just to The Simpsons but other TV shows and films that feature them) is that the vast majority of them are only beneficial to hear or see once and they tend to be of cheap filler quality designed to fill space up on the disk and look impressive on the packaging.

There are internet sources for fan audio commentaries for films and TV shows as well and even reviews of official audio commentaries - ratethatcommentary.com (site is nothing to do with me, just mentioned for purposes of discussion).