NTSC

NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, parts of South America (except Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and French Guiana), Myanmar, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories (see map).

Most countries using the NTSC standard, as well as those using other analog television standards, are switching to newer digital television standards, of which at least four different ones are in use around the world. North America, parts of Central America, and South Korea are adopting the ATSC standards, while other countries are adopting or have adopted other standards.

The first NTSC standard was developed in 1941 and had no provision for color television. In 1953 a second modified version of the NTSC standard was adopted, which allowed color television broadcasting compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers. NTSC was the first widely adopted broadcast color system and remained dominant where it had been adopted until the first decade of the 21st century, when it was replaced with digital ATSC. After nearly 70 years of use, the vast majority of over-the-air NTSC transmissions in the United States were turned off on June 12, 2009 and August 31, 2011 in Canada and most other NTSC markets. Digital broadcasting permits higher-resolution television, but digital standard definition television in these countries continues to use the frame rate and number of lines of resolution established by the analog NTSC standard; systems using the NTSC framerate and resolution (such as DVDs) are still referred to informally as "NTSC". NTSC baseband video signals are also still often used in video playback (typically of recordings from existing libraries using existing equipment) and in CCTV and surveillance video systems.