Television Standard

a standard that establishes requirements for the basic criteria of black-and-white and color television broadcasting systems and equipment.

Television standards cover five basic areas: (1) scanning criteria, such as scanning method, number of scanning lines, frame format and frequency, and horizontal and vertical scanning frequencies; (2) signal criteria, such as polarity, overall amplitude, video-frequency bandwidth, and characteristics of the blanking, synchronizing, and equalizing pulses; (3) station transmitting criteria, such as modulation method, values of the carrier frequencies for the video and audio signals, radio-frequency bandwidth, relation between video transmission and audio transmission power peaks, and polarization of the radiated electromagnetic waves; (4) television receiver criteria for the video channel, such as the radio-frequency characteristic and values of intermediate frequencies; and (5) basic planning criteria for a television broadcasting network and other requirements.

Television standards for color television broadcasting include, in addition to the above, criteria for (1) luminescence of the kinescope phosphors, (2) the reference white color, (3) the composition and parameters of the brightness and color-difference signals, (4) the modulation method and parameters of the color subcarrier signals, and (5) the characteristics of the color synchronizing signals.