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Trade barriers and field rate issues aside, don't ignore another very obvious reason European nations only adopted color TV later than the Americans did. Economics.
When NTSC color was introduced, Europe had not yet fully recovered from the immense tragedy of World War II, which left many of it's factories and research labs in ruin.
It would take some time before the economies of Western Europe would grow again. While the Americans were putting out millions of new overhead-valve cars, the European industrial economy was being driven by motorcycle production. Even the rise of the automotive mass-production age in Europe, circa 1958, was with subcompact cars, often featuring two-stroke engines with less than one-fifth the horsepower of the V-8 Chevys in America. Not until the 1970's would the purchasing power of the average European be compared to that of people in the USA or Canada.
One could also argue that Europe was not really as far behind as the introductory dates would suggest. Sure, NTSC color transmissions began in 1953, but color TV in the USA would be hampered the "chicken and egg" problem (people not buying color TV because most shows were monochrome, TV stations/networks not investing in color because very few people had color TV sets). Sales of color TV sets in USA actually -fell- between 1956 and 1960! The jam would not break until late 1965. Compare this with the UK. When BBC1 and ITN flipped the switch (15 November 1969), the market was ready-made, colour tellies - and colour programmes, were the usual quite quickly. Thus the real lag period (color America and monochrome Europe), only lasted about 5 years.
Two other things to add:
Field rate issues did not doom NTSC in Europe - there were forms of NTSC designed to work with a 50Hz field rate and a wider channel for overseas markets (much as Brazil uses PAL-M, a version of PAL for a 6MHz channel and 60Hz field rate)
I would be very interested to know how the proposed Italian "ISA-identification in alternate suppression" system worked.
Rob
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