The Coming of Color

Color television will soon come to Europe, and a mighty battle is raging over which country--and which company--will supply the system. It is a three-way skirmish among France, the U.S. and West Germany. At stake are the licensing contracts and royalty payments for a market potentially larger than that of the U.S. Some estimates put it as high as 6,000,000 sets and $4.2 billion in sales by 1970.

Although the battle is being waged on complex technical grounds, it is also producing skillful diplomatic maneuvers. Even the Russians are involved, notably in the next and most crucial round of the competition. That round will open March 24 in Vienna, where a study group of the International Radio Consultative Committee will consider which of the three systems to recommend for color transmission in an area stretching from Land's End to Vladivostok.

Contentious 5%. In the race for this prize, the U.S. system, pioneered by Radio Corp. of America, has one important advantage: it is time-tested, while the others contain experimental elements. The U.S. has had an eleven-year global monopoly on color TV, and both Canada and Japan use American apparatus. The U.S.'s competitors point out that the three systems are very similar; only 5% of the parts are different, and on that the battle hinges.

The American "NTSC" system, so named for the National Television System Committee that chose it for the U.S. in 1953, broadcasts color signals simultaneously, combining them into a composite signal for transmission and separating them again in the receiver. The French "SECAM," which stands for Sequentiel `a Memoire (sequence and memory), transmits colors alternately and meshes them with a memory device in each set (see diagram). The system is made by Compagnie Francaise de Television, which is owned fifty-fifty by glassmaking Saint-Gobain and C.S.F., France's largest electronics manufacturer. Germany's "PAL" (for phase alternating line) system, made by Telefunken, is an embellishment of the U.S. version; it sends every other color signal in its reverse shade and relies on a complex receiver to unscramble the signals.

Both the French and Germans contend that their schemes eliminate color distortions, which they claim may turn actors roast-beef red or grass overly emerald green when the U.S. system is used--over long-distance lines. U.S. technicians insist that such problems have long since been overcome, that the rival plans are too costly and that the French system has many other bugs.

Wooing the Russians. If Europe settles on a single system, that system is sure to spread over much of Africa and parts of Asia too. The chances of a firm verdict from Vienna look slim, however, because any committee finding must be unanimous; moreover, a decision would not bind any nation to go along. Yet the weight of majority opinion is expected to influence some vacillating nations to adopt one system or another, and Western Europe is so sharply split that the Soviet bloc will probably tip the Vienna vote its way.

Because Russia wants color TV by 1967 for the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and needs foreign equipment to meet that deadline, the contenders are avidly wooing the Soviets. (The only other countries that aim to begin color transmission within two years are Britain, which leans strongly to the U.S. system, and Germany, which naturally favors its own system.) France sent Information Minister Alain Peyrefitte to Moscow in January, accompanied by technicians who demonstrated the French system. If the Soviet bloc goes France's way--perhaps under the influence of France's recent trade concessions--a substantial part of the world electronics market will be hitched to the inward-looking Europe so dear to Charles de Gaulle. Fighting hard to prevent this, RCA has sent a mobile color TV studio rolling into Britain, Finland, Sweden, France, Germany and Russia. Whatever Europe does about color television will apparently owe as much to cold war politics as to technology.

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