[ppppenguin]

PAL was sometimes called "Peace At Last" in the UK.

NTSC is good system but with 1960s technology, let alone 1950s, it was very hard to maintain good colour accuracy through the broadcast chain. Ideas of using phase alternation were first tried at Hazeltine Labs in the late 1940s (I think I've got that right). Henri de France's SECAM and Bruch's PAL were both solutions to the colour accuracy problem.

SECAM is utterly different to NTSC except for the use of colour difference signals. It's also a horror story for anything byond simple cuts in the studio. Even a fade requires horrible processes that degrade the picture.

PAL used the idea of phase alternation to stop phase errors giving wrong colours. Line by line alternation depended on having a low cost 1 line delay line in the receiver. PAL receivers without one "Simple PAL" didn't give very good results and were never marketed. AFAIK.

There was no need for Sony to reverse engineer PAL. The PAL system was described in the Bruch/Telefunken patents. What Sony did was treat PAL as a sort of NTSC to navigate round the patents. Hence these Sony sets needed a hue control which true PAL sets did not. Commercially these sets were a great success and paved the way for Japanes dominance of the UK TV market. The likes of Sony and Toshiba made good reliable sets which the UK industry couldn't match until a few years later.