Television broadcast standards vary from country to country. Explore Xceive's broadcast standards knowledge base below to locate the broadcast standard in any given location. You can find info by country on many standards, including cable, terrestrial, digital and high-definition TV.
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About Analog TV

Television picture and sound information is encoded as an analog signal, that is, by varying the amplitude and frequencies of the signal. There are several incompatible broadcast television standards (technical approaches to broadcasting the picture and sound) in the world.

All analog television systems began life in monochrome. At one time, there were 14 different broadcast standards in use at different times throughout the world. Today, there are just three systems.

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These TV broadcast standards differ from each other in four important ways:
* the total number of horizontal lines in the picture: 525 or 625 for standard definition TV; 1,125 or 1,250 for HDTV
* number of frames transmitted per second (25 or 30)
* the broadcast channel width (data bandwidth of the signal)
* whether an AM- or FM-type signal is used for transmitting audio and video

Historically, the number of lines used in standard broadcast TV has ranged from the United Kingdom's 405-line monochrome system to the 819-line system used in France. Both of these systems have now been phased out, leaving us with the 525 and 625 standards for standard definition TV (SDTV). Analog transmission of television programming will cease to operate in the United States in 2009, requiring all television sets to have a digital tuner to receive television broadcasts. The United Kingdom will also begin shutting down its analog service starting in 2008. The UK plans on migrating all TV broadcasting to digital by 2012.

 

NTSC
The National Television Systems Committee's 525 line, 30-frames per second system is the analog television system in use in Korea, Japan, United States, Canada and most of the Americas.

The NTSC standard was first developed for black and white (monochrome) television in 1941. In 1953, the color standard was established. The NTSC format—or more correctly the M format; consists of 29.97 interlaced frames of video per second. Each frame consists of 486 lines out of a total of 525 (the rest are used for sync, vertical retrace, and other data such as captioning). The NTSC system interlaces its scan lines, drawing odd-numbered scan lines in odd-numbered fields and even-numbered scan lines in even-numbered fields, yielding a nearly flicker-free image at its approximately 59.94 hertz (nominally 60 Hz/1.001) refresh frequency. This compares favorably to the 50 Hz refresh rate of the 625-line PAL and SÉCAM video formats used in Europe, where 50 Hz alternating current is the standard; flicker is more likely to be noticed when using these standards (However, modern PAL TV sets use 100 Hz refresh rate to eliminate flicker, effectively displaying one frame twice). Interlacing the picture does complicate editing video, but this is true of all interlaced video formats, including PAL and SÉCAM. Unlike PAL, with its many varied underlying broadcast television systems in use throughout the world, NTSC color encoding is invariably used with broadcast system M.

 


Séquentiel couleur avec mémoire, French for "sequential color with memory" (SÉCAM) is an analog color television system first used in France. More than half of the countries in the world use some variation of either the SECAM or the PAL (Phase Alternating Line) 625-line, 25-frame systems. SECAM was originally developed in France as a non-compatible system designed to protect the country's manufacturing industry from foreign electronic imports. Because SECAM is incompatible with other TV systems, it was adopted by many former Communist countries to prevent their people from seeing and being influenced by TV programming from Western countries.

Technically, SECAM is the simplest TV system in the world. The extra 100 lines in the SECAM (and most of the PAL systems) add significant detail and clarity to the video picture, but the 50 fields per second (compared to 60-fields in the NTSC system) means that the viewer may sometimes notice a slight flicker. The 25 frames-per-second (fps) standard is very close to the international film standard of 24 fps. This slight speeding up of film to 25 fps is hard to notice.

There are three varieties of SÉCAM:
* French SÉCAM (SÉCAM-L), used in France and its former colonies
* SÉCAM-B/G, used in the Middle East, former East Germany and Greece
* SÉCAM D/K, used in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe (this is simply SÉCAM used with the D and K monochrome TV transmission standards).

 

 

PAL
Phase-Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system used in broadcast television systems in large parts of the world. PAL, a modified version of NTSC, was developed in Germany, first introduced in 1967, and is used in Britain and most of Western Europe. Except for Brazil, all of the PAL systems have 625 lines.

The name "Phase Alternating Line" refers to the way in which the color information on the video signal is reversed with each line, which automatically corrects phase errors in the transmission of the signal by canceling them out. The PAL color system's 625 lines-per-frame has 576 visible lines, the rest being used for other information such as sync data and captioning. PAL systems B, G, H, I, and N have a refresh rate of 50 interlaced fields per second (or 25 full frames per second).