The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee, NTSC, in 1941. In 1953, a second NTSC standard was adopted, which allowed for color television broadcast compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers. It is one of three major color formats for analog television, the others being PAL and SECAM. wikipedia 
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In my 400 level signals and systems class the last two periods were devoted to using our new found skills to analyses real world situations. One was the choice of the NTSC color burst frequency, and the other was optimal bit rate computation for deep space datafeeds.
NTSC video signal encoding / decoding emulation. Pure C, Integer-only. github