With a POD of 1935, have colour TV become widespread by 1960. Though the debate pictures would look positively ghastly for Nixon colorized... 
With a POD of 1935, have colour TV become widespread by 1960. Though the debate pictures would look positively ghastly for Nixon colorized...![]()
1935? But Logie Baird only demonstrated black and white ten years earlier at Selfridges in London.
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.
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.