WI Colour TV invented earlier?

With a POD of 1935, have colour TV become widespread by 1960. Though the debate pictures would look positively ghastly for Nixon colorized... :eek:
 
A mechanical system (CBS) and an electronic system (RCA) were already proven by 1940. The difficulty was transmitting a signal that could be used by both B&W and color TV's. The NTSC protocol, that permitted the same signal to be used by B&W and color systems, didn't appear until 1953. The first sets appeared in the US in 1954, but substantial color broadcasting did not begin until the mid-60s. NTSC is officially defunct in the US now; all broadcasts are digital and I believe that Canada is soon to follow.

The previous is from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television#

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So it's technically quite possible to have NTSC color sets by the late 50's. I would suggest a few variables that may have slowed adoption by the public. Perhaps the cost of the color sets was initially too high for the average consumer, and that slowed sales and implementation of color TV. Also, stations may not have had time to implement color broadcasting equipment by 1960. If a color TV set is too expensive for the average consumer, than there is little incentive for national broadcast networks to rush to color broadcasting if color advertisements are not reaching many consumers. My parents remember walking to friends' houses to watch color television when it was a novelty, often to watch a major leage baseball game or a special event. Perhaps people did not perceive an immediate need to purchase a color set if a friend had one for special occasions.

I also agree that Nixon would still look like crap on TV, but I also think that JFK would have looked over-made up as well. So who knows how the debate would have gone if it were broadcast in color.
 
I believe the TV western Bonanza was aired in color as far back as 1960. Part of the rationale was to boost the popularity of color TV sets, but they did not sell well until the mid and late sixties. Prime time TV shows were almost entirely black-and-white as late as 1964; in 1965 about half went to color; and all were in color in the fall of 1966. A $400 item in 1964 would be worth about $3000 in today's currency, so the market was limited.
 
With a POD of 1935, have colour TV become widespread by 1960. Though the debate pictures would look positively ghastly for Nixon colorized... :eek:

1935? But Logie Baird only demonstrated black and white ten years earlier at Selfridges in London.

Realistically I don't think it can be done unless colour projectors become all the rage and people buy television programmes made in colour and syncronise the soundtrack with the radio - at least in the early days - before colour sets are manufactured and distributed. Or that's just a load of crap too.
 
1935? But Logie Baird only demonstrated black and white ten years earlier at Selfridges in London.

And colour in 1928.

Here's an idea: in OTL, after WW2, a French engineer named René Barthlémy designed an 819-line analog HDTV system, which France adopted in 1949. There were attempts to adapt SECAM to the 819-line system, but this was abandoned as France switch to a more conventional, "European", 625-line system for analogue TV. To get the POD to work, maybe have some form of Franco-American co-operation so that an 819-line TV system could be introduced earlier? What would end up happening is a early, ATL form of SECAM instead of the NTSC standard.

Realistically I don't think it can be done unless colour projectors become all the rage and people buy television programmes made in colour and syncronise the soundtrack with the radio - at least in the early days - before colour sets are manufactured and distributed. Or that's just a load of crap too.[/QUOTE]
 
Color TV earlier will only lead to a earlier craze for reality TV thus accelerating humanity's de-evolution.
 
Here's an idea: in OTL, after WW2, a French engineer named René Barthlémy designed an 819-line analog HDTV system, which France adopted in 1949. There were attempts to adapt SECAM to the 819-line system, but this was abandoned as France switch to a more conventional, "European", 625-line system for analogue TV. To get the POD to work, maybe have some form of Franco-American co-operation so that an 819-line TV system could be introduced earlier? What would end up happening is a early, ATL form of SECAM instead of the NTSC standard.

I am certain a widescreen analogue 819 line TV CRT would have been wildly expensive to manufacture through the 1970s, unless liquid crystal technology was as inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago as it is today. The technical limitations of the CRT make it hard to understand why anyone would want to go beyond NTSC/PAL standards. The inadequacy of analogue TV CRT is glaringly apparent when one watches a digitally transmitted program on an CRT set.

Why did France persist with SECAM when most of the world was either PAL or NTSC? Was it that the French put so great an effort into their system that it was too late or not cost efficient to go to PAL? Or was it a way to control broadcasting? Britain came close to adopting NTSC in the 60's, but eventually decided on PAL. If Britain went with NTSC it might have displaced or minimized PAL in other parts of the world, making for greater compatibility between television sets.
 
I am certain a widescreen analogue 819 line TV CRT would have been wildly expensive to manufacture through the 1970s, unless liquid crystal technology was as inexpensive twenty or thirty years ago as it is today.

Hence the Belgian "System F", wich was a more cost-efficent version of the French "System E" and which allowed 819-line TV to be broadcast on a conventional 7 MHz channel (the French System E required 14 MHz channels, which is seen by some as a waste of spectrum even with its near-HDTV picture quality).

The technical limitations of the CRT make it hard to understand why anyone would want to go beyond NTSC/PAL standards. The inadequacy of analogue TV CRT is glaringly apparent when one watches a digitally transmitted program on an CRT set.

In hindsight/retrospect, maybe.

Why did France persist with SECAM when most of the world was either PAL or NTSC? Was it that the French put so great an effort into their system that it was too late or not cost efficient to go to PAL?

Partly that, yes - maybe even national pride (after all, would they want to adopt a "German" standard? That's probably the attitude of the time). Also, SECAM (or, to use the original acronym, SÉCAM) was developed before PAL, since NTSC on an 819-line system would've come out horrible since the limitations of NTSC would be on public display - hence the alternate name "Never Twice the Same Colo(u)r". Had a SECAM version of the 819-line standard came out instead of France signing onto a pan-European agreement limiting colour TV to a 625-line standard, then it woud have been interesting to see the result. But yeah, I think it was because it was not cost-efficent to go to PAL because of the extraordinary effort first for the 819-line system, and then for SECAM.

Or was it a way to control broadcasting? Britain came close to adopting NTSC in the 60's, but eventually decided on PAL. If Britain went with NTSC it might have displaced or minimized PAL in other parts of the world, making for greater compatibility between television sets.

I don't think it was a way to "control" broadcasting, however.
 
There is another factor: many motion pictures in the fifties were still black and white. Early color movies were colorized black and white (e.g., Technicolor). Color photography itself was expensive and encumbered until the Ektachrome and Kodacolor patents expired in the sixties. With ASA ratings of 12 and 16 in the fifties, the now discontinued Kodachrome process was limited and light-intense.
 
There is another factor: many motion pictures in the fifties were still black and white. Early color movies were colorized black and white (e.g., Technicolor). Color photography itself was expensive and encumbered until the Ektachrome and Kodacolor patents expired in the sixties. With ASA ratings of 12 and 16 in the fifties, the now discontinued Kodachrome process was limited and light-intense.

Even if it were possible to manufacture 819 line compatible CRT TV's in the 60's, the Technicolor movies broadcasted would not have come anywhere close to achieving the potential of the 819-line system. This would be another reason not to pursue early hi-def analog technology. I don't think that even Betamax and Umatic would have provided enough resolution to complement hi-def analog, but perhaps I'm wrong. I only say this because VHS --> DVD conversions are oftentimes quite poor, either due to the inherent limitations of magnetic tape video or the age of the cassette (or possibly both). The advent of digital recording media like the DVD has finally married the recording technology to the video transmission technology, something has could not have been done easily in the past.
 
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