Another way to put it: this page not only needs some editorial cleanup, it deserves it.
I had no idea of the politics behind the old-school TV standards -- I'd always assumed that they emerged fully formed from an archaeo-MPEG organization of some sort, where a bunch of industry players cooperated and pooled their patents, and where the regulators got involved only at the rubber-stamp stage.
It was well worth the time needed to plow through the verbiage, but not everybody will give it the same chance I did, which is a bummer.
It was long-winded. However, the intersection of raw technology, consumer product manufacturing and distribution, show business, and government regulation makes for a complicated story.
I can't think of anything in the modern era as kludgy as mechanical sequential color TV systems making it into 'production'.
In the world of color, remember ansi.sys ? That was about 40 years after NTSC. Imagine how well color TV would have worked if the color information had been sent by embedded escape codes.
In the over-the-air broadcasting world, there are all those sub-carriers riding on just about all the FM signals making background monkey-chatter for each other.
And before multiplexing by frequency came along, there were those center-tap
methods of sending three signals on two lines, seven signals on four lines (did anyone ever get it to work for fifteen signals on eight lines)?
I had no idea of the politics behind the old-school TV standards -- I'd always assumed that they emerged fully formed from an archaeo-MPEG organization of some sort, where a bunch of industry players cooperated and pooled their patents, and where the regulators got involved only at the rubber-stamp stage.
It was well worth the time needed to plow through the verbiage, but not everybody will give it the same chance I did, which is a bummer.