PAL-M is the analogue TV system used in

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

since 19 February 1972. At that time, Brazil was the first

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

n country to broadcast in

colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are assoc ...

Colour Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are assoc ...

TV broadcast began on 19 February 1972, when the TV networks Globo and Bandeirantes transmitted the Caxias do Sul Grape Festival. Transition from black and white to colour, however, was not complete until 1978. Two years later, in 1980, colour broadcast nationwide in Brazil was commonplace. It is unique among analogue TV systems in that it combines the 525-line 30 frames-per-second System M with the

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

colour encoding system (using very nearly the

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

subcarrier frequency), unlike all other countries which pair

with 625-line systems and

with 525-line systems.

Origins

NTSC being the "natural" choice for countries with monochrome standard M, the choice of a different

system poses problems of incompatibility with available hardware and the need to develop new television sets and production hardware.

Walter Bruch Walter Bruch (2 March 1908 – 5 May 1990) was a German electrical engineer and pioneer of German television. He was the inventor of Closed-circuit television. He invented the PAL colour television system at Telefunken in the early 1960s. In add ...

, inventor of PAL, explains Brazil's choice of PAL over NTSC against these odds by an advertising campaign

Telefunken Telefunken was a German radio and television apparatus company, founded in Berlin in 1903, as a joint venture of Siemens & Halske and the ''Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft'' (AEG) ('General electricity company'). The name "Telefunken" ap ...

and

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

carried out across South America in 1972, which included colour test broadcasts of popular shows (done with TV Globo) and technical demonstrations with executives of television stations.

Technical specifications

PAL-M signals are generically identical to North American NTSC signals, except for the encoding of the

carrier. Both systems are based on the monochrome CCIR System M standard, therefore, PAL-M will display in monochrome with sound on an NTSC set and vice versa. PAL-M is incompatible with 625-line based versions of PAL, because its frame rate, scan line,

subcarrier and sound carrier specifications are different. It will therefore usually give a rolling and/or squashed monochrome picture with no sound on a native European PAL television, as do NTSC signals.

PAL-M systems conversion issues

PAL-M being a standard unique to one country, the need to convert it to/from other standards often arises. * Conversion to/from NTSC is easy, as only the

carrier needs to be changed. Frame rate and scan lines can remain untouched. * Conversion to/from PAL/625 lines/25 frame/s and SECAM/625/25 signals involves changing the frame rates as well as the scan lines. This is achieved using complicated circuitry involving a digital frame store, the same method used for converting between NTSC and the 625/25 standards. The fact that the colour encoding of PAL-M and PAL/625/25 is the same does not help, as the entire signal goes through an A/D-D/A conversion process anyway. However some special VHS video recorders are available which can allow viewers the flexibility of enjoying PAL-M recordings using a standard PAL (625/50 Hz) colour TV, or even through multi-system TV sets. Video recorders like

Panasonic formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...

NV-W1E (AG-W1 for the USA), AG-W2, AG-W3, NV-J700AM,

Aiwa is a consumer electronics brand owned and used by various companies in different regions of the world. American and other regions are owned by Chicago-based Aiwa Corporation. Towada Audio based in Tokyo owns the rights to the brand in Japa ...

HV-MX100, HV-MX1U,

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

SV-4000W and SV-7000W feature a digital TV system conversion circuitry. Some recorders support the other way around, being able to playback standard PAL (625/50 Hz) in 50 Hz-compatible PAL-M TV sets, such as the Panasonic NV-FJ605.

PAL 60

The PAL

system (either baseband or with any RF system, with the normal 4.43 MHz subcarrier unlike PAL-M) can also be applied to an NTSC-like 525-line picture to form what is often known as "PAL-60" (sometimes "PAL-60/525," "Pseudo-PAL," or "Quasi-PAL"). This non-standard signal is a method used in European domestic VCRs and

DVD player A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to ...

s for playback of NTSC material on PAL televisions. It's not identical to PAL-M and incompatible with it, because the colour subcarrier is at a different frequency; it will therefore display in monochrome on PAL-M and NTSC television sets.

Technological obsolescence

SBTVD and ABERT/SET tests

The analog PAL-M was scheduled to be supplanted by a digital high-definition system named Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital (SBTVD) by 2015, and finishing in 2018. From 1999 to 2000, the

ABERT Abert is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * John James Abert (1788–1863), American cartographer * James William Abert (1820–1897), explorer * Johann Joseph Abert (1832–1915), composer *Hermann Abert (1871–1927), music his ...

/SET group in Brazil did system comparison tests of ATSC, DVB-T and ISDB-T under the supervision of the CPqD foundation. Originally, Brazil including Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay planned to adopt the DVB-T standard. However, the ABERT/SET group selected ISDB-T, after field-tests results showed that it was the most robust system under Brazilian reception conditions. Therefore, SBTVD was replaced by the Brazilian variant of the ISDB standard,

ISDB-Tb ISDB-T International, or SBTVD, short for Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão Digital ( en, Brazilian Digital Television System), is a technical standard for digital television broadcast used in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Botswana, Chile, Honduras, Ve ...

, which features SBTVD's characteristics into the originally-Japanese digital norm.