Early color TV in Italy

[firenzeprima]

I found some interesting publish rare pictures relating to the advent of color TV in Italy. As you can see, up from 1968, Rai was able to send color broadcasts and begin testing, including comparative between the various systems NTSC, PAL and SECAM. using RCA equipment (TK 41). On the Rome area radiates the first experimental signals to NTSC color. Then everything was frozen due to economic crisis in Italy and the obtuseness of political leaders.
The tests resumed later in 1975 with equipment Philips (LDK 3). In practice Rai for years had the color TV programs and broadcast them in black and white and color broadcasts coming from abroad, such as football matches. Typical Italian paradoxes. Not to mention the waste of money in studies to equip color broadcasts in 1968 and then not use them for years.

[ceebee23]

Italy was not the only country to have politicians play games with colour television.

Australia did not get colour TV until 1975 despite pressure from the broadcasters, primarily because the government did not want to spend money to upgrade the national broadcaster, the ABC (which is modelled on the BBC).

Colour tests began in the late 50s and continued throughout the 60s with 625 line variants of NTSC and both SECAM and PAL. Australia ultimately adopted PAL G in line with much of Europe.

[Kiwick]

Actually, the 1972 olympic games were broadcast in color, but color sets were still quite rare back then, most were owned by bars, venues, clubs, political parties or other institutions,

color sets began to sell in serious numbers in about 1975 as prices went down enough to be affordable for middle class people.

What's fun is that Autovox, Phonola and many other Italian manufacturers were making color sets in the late 60s and sold them on foreign markets (mostly Germany and the UK)

[Sandy G]

That's what I've NEVER understood- Why wasn't the population in every country that DIDN'T have color TV raising hell about it ? It wasn't like it was some big American state secret that we wouldn't share w/anyone...And England, Italy, Australia aren't exactly backwards 3rd world shitholes, either... And Australia sent at least ONE program to America in the 60s-early '70s-"Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo"-that was most assuredly in color...I remember seeing it when I was a kid. So they HAD the equipment then, they just weren't willing to use it. Politicians....they could screw up a 2-car funeral...

[Kiwick]

probably because most European countries had state owned TV networks and they were reluctant to spend money on color equipment (that's not just cameras and studio equipment, but also the nationwide distribution network, $$$$$)

Most other European countries got official color TV broacasts in 1967 or 68, but since we're Italians, we had to wait another decade, until 1977 when official PAL color programming began in Italy, before that, politicians were fighting over PAL and SECAM color standards and as a result many PAL sets were sold with optional SECAM decoders.

[electroking]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

That's what I've NEVER understood- Why wasn't the population in every country that DIDN'T have color TV raising hell about it ? It wasn't like it was some big American state secret that we wouldn't share w/anyone...And England, Italy, Australia aren't exactly backwards 3rd world shitholes, either... And Australia sent at least ONE program to America in the 60s-early '70s-"Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo"-that was most assuredly in color...I remember seeing it when I was a kid. So they HAD the equipment then, they just weren't willing to use it. Politicians....they could screw up a 2-car funeral...

Maybe Skippy was produced using film techniques, so no colo(u)r video
equipment was involved. I don't believe this series was ever rebroadcast
in Canada after 1976, as we didn't get a color TV until 1977 (in my
household, I mean) and I never saw it in color. Just my two cents' worth.

P.S.: a look at Wikipedia confirms that it was produced on 16-mm color film.

[ceebee23]

The problem was government and bureaucracy ...the cost and indecision on the system ..PAL vs SECAM... and then licensing issues (PAL had to be licensed)... but the main factor was that the government didn't want to spend money on upgrading the national broadcaster.

Political interference has not ended... digital tv in Australia has been hamstrung but absurd rules to protect friends of the government ... but that is nothing new!

But getting back to colour stuff... programs made in Australia for sale overseas were often filmed in colour ...so overseas veiwers often saw material in colour made here well before we did.

As for me ..to be honest 625 NTSC would have been fine and we could have done it in 1956!!!

[firenzeprima]

In 1965 the Italian Parliament had decided to postpone to 1970 the introduction of
Color broadcasts, although since 1962 the transmitter of Mount Mario, in
to Rome, radiates the first experimental television signals color
with the American system N.T.S.C. (National Television System Committee) and
were subsequently equipped production studios for broadcast in color.
In 1966 in Rome were organized as part of office received from
European Broadcasting, a series of demonstrations with comparative systems
N.T.S.C. American in 1953, SE.C.A.M. (Sequential coleur a Memoire)
and the 1959 French P.A.L. (Phase alternation line) German (Patented by
TELEFUNKEN) in 1965.
Note that in the course of 1969 almost all European nations
had introduced the color in their broadcasts. The R.A.I., although
already equipped to do so, he was hampered by Parliament for reasons of rigor
economic, and even the automobile idustry that the new
Consumer durable (the color TV) constituted a dangerous alternative to purchase
the second car.
To satisfy the parties is ended up taking a typical italian decision: it was decided to broadcast with both systems (PAL and SECAM) the Olympic Games
Monaco, 1972.
Finally reached on 11 August 1975
day on which the Head of State issued the Presidential Decree No. 452 which
official selection for the German system and gave time for one year to start
transmissions. In the spring of 1976 was exceptionally decided to groadcast in color
Montreal Olympics which took place in July of that year. Only
from 1 February 1977 R.A.I. officially began broadcasting color television , exiting a tunnel of uncertainty and controversy lasted well 12 years.

[ohohyodafarted]

I don't know the facts of why Europe was so behind the times in adopting color tv, but if adopting color tv is anything like the highly protectionist attitudes that govern socialist dominated Europe today, with respect to many other technologies that were invented elsewhere, Then I suspect that the..... "if we didn't invent it and perfect it, then we won't use it" attitude may have been at the root cause of why it took so long to get color in Europe. NTSC could have been adopted right from the start, but that would have given an opening to American tv manufacturers to sell sets into the European market.

A good old American powerhouse corporation RCA invented color tv and the European governments figured if they used a non-ntsc system, then they could shut out US tv manufacturers and foster a tv industry based in Euroland. It was all based on the ecconomics of creating barriers to the importation of goods from other countrys, and creating an environment for products to be made in Europe.

The delay of color tv to Europe was totally political, based on a protectionist mentality to try and foster an industry for the manufacturer of color tv within Europe and the jobs that a European based color tv industry would create. Unfortunately while the Europeans argued, and nit picked about how to achieve the end goal, the rest of the world leap froged Europe and left it's citizens with yesterdays black and white technology. As always in these situations, the brunt of these bad political decissions, were born by the average citizens who went without color tv long after the rest of the world had passed them by.

A prime example of a similar situation today, is the adoption of 3G wireless, Code Division Mutliple Access (CDMA) in Europe.

Qualcomm, a US technological giant, invented CDMA, and it has been available in the USA and other advanced countries like Korea and India since before 2000. But Because it wasn't invented by Europeans, the EU stonewalled CDMA2000, and REFUSED to use it, and continued to use inferior GSM, a boogered up version of TDMA, until the Europeans could booger up CDMA2000 into a wideband version called WCDMA, and rename it UMTS, just so the Europeans could save face and say they invented it. In fact, if it haden't been for the fact that Qualcomm engineers, solved the WCDMA handoff problem for the European engineers, it is probable that the European engineers would still be scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to get WCDMA to work today, and Europe would probably still be without 3G cellular if Qualcomm haden't fixed it for them.

Well guess what? The Europeans are paying a royalty on every WCDMA phone sold, everywhere in the world to guess who?? that's right, Qualcomm, a US corporation who invented the core technology that WCDMA is based on. Draging their feet on 3G didn't save the Europeans a dime. All it did was delay the adoption of a more advanced technology by about 5 years, after the rest of the world already had it in the form of CDMA2000.

Even the Chineese are playing stupid games like this with a version they call TDSCDMA (time division synchronous code division multiple access)

I Hope I didn't step on anyones toes, but that is how I see the the wireless wars, which are just a repeat of the old color tv wars. I have been watching the progress of wireless since the beginning of 2G TDMA (the core of GSM), which BTW was also invented in the USA by Motorola, the company that invented the concept of "cellular wireless phone technology"

Unfortunately RCA, the company that invented color tv, became a victum of America's free trade policies, in a world where artificial barriers to the importation of foreign goods, as practiced by other nations, was, and still is, the rule. The importation of cheap goods into the U.S. from the orient with no protection from the U.S. government for RCA, is what killed this once powerful icon of U.S. industry.

America is a world leader in the developement of advanced technologies in many fields of reasearch. Placing barriers to the adoption of superior American technologies, for political reasons is both ludicrous and arrogant.

I was formerly a free market proponent, but if the rest of the world isn't going to play by the same rules, then you need to fight fire with fire.

Our US auto industry is in a difficult situation right now. It's due to grossly unaffordable union contracts that Ford, Gm and Chrystler made with the labor union thugs many years ago, and also due to an attitude of our government that refuses to protect our vital US industries, from foreign competition. America needs to place huge tarifs on the importation of autos and other foreign goods, just like other countries do to U.S. goods. Maybe when we turn the tables around and close our boarders to the importation of foreign goods, other countries will see that they need to trade fairly with the U.S. and buy as much form the U.S. as we buy from them.

I think we may be about to see just such a protectionist trend start when the new president takes office. The Democrats are very protective of American Labor Unions, and now that they have a Democrat for president, they will have the power to place import tarrifs against goods that threaten vital American industries, and the jobs that are created by them. Americans are mad as hell and we're not going to take the ecconomic abuses we have suffered, at the hands of other countries, any longer.

The rest of the world has had a protectionist attitude for decades, it's time the U.S. started treating the rest of the world the way it has been treating us.

Sorry if I got off on a tangent, but the issue of late adoption of color tv in Europe was not a technological issue, it was a protectionist ecconomic and governmental issue, and as such, is directly related to current, worldwide, ecconmic and trade policys.

[firenzeprima]

What you say is partly true. But do not forget that the American industry first went to build their products in Asia - China, putting on the road hundreds of thousands of workers. Then is not so true that we Europeans do protectionism, indeed. An example is the system of consumer VCRs. In Europe was developed by Grundig, the "Video 2000" already widely best to JVC's VHS and Sony's Betamax. Result: it was decided to adopt the VHS, killing the Video2000 and Betamax. On the failure Adoption of NTSC in Europe, assume not only political problems, but technical, the NTSC goes to 525 lines and 60HZ, European standards at 50HZ 405 GB, 819 50HZ France and the rest at 626 50HZ. then were very blatant defects of instability color NTSC (Never twice the same color) and the unreal purplish color of the skin. We Europeans have fixed the flaws and shortcomings of the American system first with then with PAL SECAM. (even in Italy was developed a color system, the ISA, identification in alternate suppression), which remained at trial.

[tubesrule]

While I believe the argument can be made that SECAM was a mostly politically motivated effort, I don't think the same can be said of PAL. Experiments with NTSC had been going on in the UK and Europe since the late 1950's. England was well on the way to finalizing an NTSC based 405 system (they had also done tests using SECAM) when PAL came along. The one advantage PAL offers over NTSC is the ability to provide accurate colors without a user control (tint or hue). This is accomplished by averaging out transmission phase errors by averaging successive lines of opposite color information. With this system, under all but the most severe transmission problems, colors in the PAL system will always be accurate without the user twiddling a knob. However this comes at the cost of less color saturation on phase errors, and half the vertical color resolution of NTSC. This can certainly be viewed as a worthwhile improvement and a reason they adopted the PAL standard.

I also don't believe they would have been worried about the US flooding their markets with color televisions if they had adopted NTSC. American companies never produced a monochrome 405 line set for the UK, or an 819 line set for France, or a 625 line set for Europe (pre-PAL). These sets were produce by UK and European companies, so it is safe in saying these companies would have produced the color sets regardless of the color system used. Philips and Telefunken were quite capable of producing these sets, as much of their pre-war television technology was superior to ours. Also, the remaining experimental NTSC sets from the 1950's are not just RCA sets modified for the particular line standard like 405. They are sets produced by the local company like Pye, of course using an RCA CRT as they had a lock on the shadow mask CRT.

[Captain Video]

"The delay of color tv to Europe was totally political, based on a protectionist mentality to try and foster an industry for the manufacturer of color tv within Europe and the jobs that a European based color tv industry would create."

I HAVE to say that the European politicians were not exactly wrong on thinking that way. The use of protectionism was the tool that almost every nation that was able to develop it's own industries used to really be able to foster it's industrial development.

Japan did this. Europe did this. Here in South America, we, Brazilians, were only able to start our own Industrial Revolution AFTER 1930, when we began placing barriers to products made in the USA and in Europe. Argentina also did the same thing, and it's no coincidence that Brazil and Argentina are the two most industrialized countries in Latin America. Our never-ending social crisis only got worse after 1990, when our government started a free-trade policy that opened our borders to widespread imports of foreign goods; that broke some REALLY BIG and traditional Brazilian factories, leaving THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of Brazilian workers unemployed, and to this day is still flooding our shops with products that are REAL GARBAGE, when before 1990 we at least had Brazilian-good quality versions of those same products.

In reality, I strongly suspect that the no-protectionism attitude of the American governments in the last 50 years had to do with the needs of foreign policy: they NEEDED a strong Japan, and a strong South Koreia, and a strong Taiwan, and a strong West Germany, to be really able to counter the Soviet threat in Asia and in Europe; that's why America never really placed barriers to the vast imports that came from those countries, because, if they didn't sell to the USA, in reality there were no one else they could sell to. America was the only country that was rich enough to buy goods in the amount that was necessary to maintain social peace in those countries.And, if they were not able to export, a social crisis might have erupted in those countries, and then... the communists could have taken over.

I suspect that now that the communist threat is over, and that America is in economic crisis, but not only America, but also Europe and Asia are in economic crisis as well, the world might return to a pre-World War One state, in which the coutries were very protectionist of their own industrial assets and were all very competitive against each other.

I can only hope that communism and nazism will NOT be reborn as a result of all this.

[firenzeprima]

I just want to remind friends of the forum which will deal with topics here essentially technical and electronic devices, the high political and leave out or you will upset the purposes of this interesting site. thanks

[Robert Grant]

Trade barriers and field rate issues aside, don't ignore another very obvious reason European nations only adopted color TV later than the Americans did. Economics.

When NTSC color was introduced, Europe had not yet fully recovered from the immense tragedy of World War II, which left many of it's factories and research labs in ruin.

It would take some time before the economies of Western Europe would grow again. While the Americans were putting out millions of new overhead-valve cars, the European industrial economy was being driven by motorcycle production. Even the rise of the automotive mass-production age in Europe, circa 1958, was with subcompact cars, often featuring two-stroke engines with less than one-fifth the horsepower of the V-8 Chevys in America. Not until the 1970's would the purchasing power of the average European be compared to that of people in the USA or Canada.

One could also argue that Europe was not really as far behind as the introductory dates would suggest. Sure, NTSC color transmissions began in 1953, but color TV in the USA would be hampered the "chicken and egg" problem (people not buying color TV because most shows were monochrome, TV stations/networks not investing in color because very few people had color TV sets). Sales of color TV sets in USA actually -fell- between 1956 and 1960! The jam would not break until late 1965. Compare this with the UK. When BBC1 and ITN flipped the switch (15 November 1969), the market was ready-made, colour tellies - and colour programmes, were the usual quite quickly. Thus the real lag period (color America and monochrome Europe), only lasted about 5 years.

Two other things to add:
Field rate issues did not doom NTSC in Europe - there were forms of NTSC designed to work with a 50Hz field rate and a wider channel for overseas markets (much as Brazil uses PAL-M, a version of PAL for a 6MHz channel and 60Hz field rate)

I would be very interested to know how the proposed Italian "ISA-identification in alternate suppression" system worked.

Rob

[ceebee23]

In reality the issues was combination of cost and belief that NTSC could be improved ...primarily to overcome the problem of phase errors and in Europe the decision to bring colour to the 625/50 standard when it was introduced as both France and UK had different monochrome standards in place.

Politics played a part with the competition between SECAM and PAL and it took sometime for the technical issues for both to be resolved.

Early PAL and SECAM versions both had serious issues.

In reality NTSC on 625/50 (or even 405/50 UK standard) would have worked fine ..but it is all history now... the analogue era is ending everywhere.

But we have been through the same debate with digital broadcasting ATSC vs DVB etc.