50 years of colour television

No ideal thread set up to place this in, and not worth starting a new one.

Item on BBC Breakfast this morning, about the launch of Colour TV on the BBC at the Wimbledon 1967 Championships.

Video here:



Charlie, the colour pink was not "very nearly" the chosen colour for the Wimbledon balls to aid viewing on colour sets. If you listen to the item, it was one of a number of colours being considered.

Would have been better in the Wimbledon thread really.

Or heck, perhaps a thread of it's own. Other people do see the "New Topic" button right?

It's a discussion which will interest people beyond those looking up Wimbledon coverage and seeing what the latest onemess is!

Other people read the post before making a sarcastic reply, right?
(my emphasis)

He made a considered choice not to start a new thread. You might reasonably disagree with that call but the snarky reply is not called for.

Great to see the BBC marking this but of course they're focusing on the BBC being the first in Europe. Presumably the US networks beat them to it - what were their first colour broadcasters?

US colour broadcasts started in the mid-50s. CBS were allowed to launch, briefly, a standard that was incompatible with existing black and white receivers, but this was then shelved, and RCA's compatible system replaced it by c. 1957.

So the US had colour 10 years before Europe. However the early US colour services were pretty limited. RCA not only owned the colour patents for the broadcast standard, but they were the main manufacturer of colour cameras. CBS ended up working with Philips North America (aka Norelco) on the development of cameras to rival RCAs, and those cameras were some of the first used in Europe. Arguably by waiting 10 years we ended up with better tech to launch with. The same was true of HDTV too...

Found an interesting YouTube video which explains the whole NTSC 29.97fps vs 30fps issue, and even offers a cleaner fix than what they mandated.

And that was partly the reason why ABC and CBS were slower than NBC into going colour. ABC didn't start regular colour programming till 1962, CBS didn't until 1965! They didn't want to "promote" something which benefitted a rival network (as RCA owned NBC).

If only we'd done that with digital radio!

What's your problem with 64kbps mono MP2 audio streams?

Well HD Radio doesn't exactly improve on the DAB standard, and DAB+ is here in the UK now...

Well, I meant if we had theoretically waited until DAB+ to launch digital radio in the UK, as other countries have been able to do. Though, I'll admit I was pleasantly surprised by DAB+ actually taking off here.

I wonder out of the two possible future switchovers, whether going from the mix of DVB-T/DVB-T2 to solely DVB-T2 or going from DAB/DAB+ to solely DAB+ will be more disruptive?