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This has been making the rounds today and does a great job at explaining one of the more irritating FPS standards, and the history behind it:

Interesting - thanks, Ned.

I suppose they could also have *shrunk* the bandwidth, even if *extending* it beyond 4.5MHz wasn't permissible. I'm sure that would have had implications for existing equipment, though - the channel centres could probably have stayed the same, but the spread around them would inevitably have confused many (most? all?) receivers given the analogue nature of things.

It's a pretty impressive hack. There were so many existing BW TVs that it would have killed the market in the US to not have backwards compatibility with them, so they found what the old TVs would tolerate. The slightly altered framerate was the best they could come up with and worked really well, all things considered.

hackaday.com had some interesting comments about the video, too. Apparently Europe's situation was an even bigger mess before PAL became a true standard. So many different TV set standards that backwards compatibility simply wasn't practical. Hence, a much cleaner and forward looking standard resulted. It also happened later in history, so I wonder if the costs involved to change both TVs and broadcasting equipment was not as bad.

(2016-10-09, 23:23)Ned Scott Wrote: [ -> ]It's a pretty impressive hack. There were so many existing BW TVs that it would have killed the market in the US to not have backwards compatibility with them, so they found what the old TVs would tolerate. The slightly altered framerate was the best they could come up with and worked really well, all things considered.

hackaday.com had some interesting comments about the video, too. Apparently Europe's situation was an even bigger mess before PAL became a true standard. So many different TV set standards that backwards compatibility simply wasn't practical. Hence, a much cleaner and forward looking standard resulted. It also happened later in history, so I wonder if the costs involved to change both TVs and broadcasting equipment was not as bad.

Are you sure you are not confusing TV color coding standards and TV broadcasting standards? Because I don't think there was any practical color coding standard in Europe before PAL, which is, in its turn, an improved version of NTSC color coding. But as far as TV broadcasting standards concerned, it was a total mess, and still is in those countries that are still using analog TV broadcasting, like Ukraine. And in combination with different color coding systems it led to more mess with various incompatible and partially compatible standards. For example, most of Western Europe used B/G broadcasting system and PAL color coding. Great Britain used PAL with its own broadcasting system. France developed both its own broadcasting system and color coding system - SECAM. Soviet Union used its own D/K broadcasting system and adopted French SECAM. So did most of the Soviet satellite countries with a couple of exceptions. Eastern Germany used Western B/G broadcasting with SECAM color coding, so Western and Eastern Germanies could watch each other's TV programs in B/W. If I'm not mistaken, Romania used PAL with the Sovied TV broadcasting standard.
From end-user perspective this was a total mess too, until high density analog chips with coil-less receiving circuits were introduced which were later replaced with digital signal processors. Those chips and DSPs can process any possible combination of TV broadcasting and color coding standards.

In Ukraine D/K SECAM analog broadcasting is still used but it is gradually replaced with DVB-T. This is not to mention that most people in big cities are using cable instead of radio waves from TV towers.

I'm talking about the black and white broadcasting standards before PAL. In the US those standards were more.. standard.. and it was more important for NTSC color to be backwards compatible (even up to the 70s, there were huge numbers of B/W TVs, and were still sold in the 80s and 90s). In Europe there were too many competing B/W standards, so it made sense to not restrict PAL with the same backwards compatibility requirements.

At least, that was what was explained to me. As far as I know, Europe might not actually exist. I've been there a few times, but I'm not totally convinced yet...

Not so long ago, early high definition analogue flat panel adopters were shafted when the market introduced HDCP on the new HD players and thus obsoleted their investment.
These people then quickly upgaded to new flat panels and were later shafted again when the market introduced a more efficient MPEG-4 encoding standard for OTA broadcasts (which these older sets couldn't process).
So they upgraded again (some buying a set top box if they didn't want to spend the money on an otherwise working panel).
Now it's all UHD, HDR, etc... but alteast the old stuff works.

Contrast this to the B/W TV days in europe where AFAIK (and dispite a hotch potch of standards) these old TVs still worked in the transition to color TV

Sadly, changing standards seems to have been normalised these days, judging by how some people replace their mobile phones, in some cases, yearly
Tell these people your old analog color TV lasted 25 years (and you still have a working B/W TV) and you expect hardware should last more than a decade and the looks you get are incredulous.
Meanwhile, these people argue why a note7 is better than iphone7 (while ignoring the fact that the Samsungs issue would have been easier to handle had they kept a removeable and standardised battery).
It's a real contrast to days gone, by where there was an effort put into preserving the old via a stong focus on backward compatability and longevity during developement
The change in mindset is unbelievable really

So, in todays modern throw away society, things like backward compatability and longevity take a back seat while buying landfill sites seems like the next get rich quick scheme