The Paris-Moscow Axis

On March 25 delegates to the International Radio Consultative Committee representing Europe (both East and West), the United States, Canada and some nations of Latin America and northern Africa, sat down in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace to discuss a major problem of the next decade: what system is to be adopted for color-TV? (With typically contemporary irony, the opening had had to be postponed a day because of a strike in Austria that shut down, among other things, all TV and radio). There were three candidates: the American NTSC (National Television System Committee), already adopted by the U.S., Canada and Japan, the only countries where color-TV has gone public; the French SECAM (Sequential and Memory); and the West German PAL (Phase Alternating Line), similar to the American system.

Burnham

JB

About the Author

James Burnham

Featured Tags

On March 25 delegates to the International Radio Consultative Committee representing Europe (both East and West), the United States, Canada and some nations of Latin America and northern Africa, sat down in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace to discuss a major problem of the next decade: what system is to be adopted for color-TV? (With typically contemporary irony, the opening had had to be postponed a day because of a strike in Austria that shut down, among other things, all TV and radio). There were three candidates: the American NTSC (National Television System Committee), already adopted by the U.S., Canada and Japan, the only countries where color-TV has gone public; the French SECAM (Sequential and Memory); and the West German PAL (Phase Alternating Line), similar to the American system.

Burnham