SECAM elsewhere
Work on SECAM began in 1956. The technology was ready by the end of the fifties, but this was too soon for a wide introduction. Initially, a version of SECAM for the French 819-line television standard was devised and tested, but not introduced. Following a pan-European agreement to introduce color TV only in 625 lines, France had to start the conversion by switching over to a 625-line television standard, which happened at the beginning of the 1960s with the introduction of a second network.
The first proposed system was called SECAM I in 1961, followed by other studies to improve compatibility and image quality.
These improvements were called SECAM II and SECAM III with the later being presented at the 1965 CCIR General Assembly in Vienna.
Further improvements were SECAM III A followed by SECAM III B, the adopted system for general usage in 1967.
Soviet technicians were involved in the development of the standard, and even created their own incompatible variant called NIR or SECAM IV, which was not deployed. The team was working in Moscow's Telecentrum under Professor Chmakov's direction. The NIR designation comes from the name of the Nautchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Radio NIIR research institute involved in the studies. Two standards were developed: Non-linear NIR in which a process analogous to gamma correction is used and Linear NIR or SECAM IV that omits this process.
SECAM was inaugurated in France on October 1, 1967, on la deuxième chaîne (the second channel), now called France 2. A group of four suited men—a presenter and 3 contributors to the system's development, including De France—was shown standing in a studio. Following a count from 10, the originally black and white image switched to color; the presenter then declared "Et voici la couleur !" (fr: And here is color!)
The first color television sets cost 5000 Francs. Color TV was not very popular initially; only about 1500 people watched the inaugural program in color. A year later, only 200,000 sets had been sold of an expected million. This pattern was similar to the earlier slow build-up of color television popularity in the USA.
SECAM was later adopted by former French and Belgian colonies, Greece, the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries (except Romania), and Middle Eastern countries. However, with the fall of communism, and following a period when multi-standard TV sets became a commodity, many Eastern European countries decided to switch to PAL.
Development
Some have argued that the primary motivation for the development of SECAM in France was to protect French television equipment manufacturers. However, incompatibility had started with the earlier decision to unusually adopt positive video modulation for French broadcast signals. The earlier British System A was the only other system to use positive video modulation. In addition, SECAM development predates PAL. NTSC was considered undesirable in Europe because of its tint problem requiring an additional control, which SECAM and PAL solved. The joke was that "SECAM" stood for «System Essentially Contrary to the American Method» versus NTSC «Never Twice the Same Color» whilst «Peace At Last» could only be obtained through the PAL system. (But another version of the joke expands PAL as «People Are Lavender» or «Pay Another License»). Nonetheless, SECAM was partly developed for reasons of national pride. Henri de France's personal charisma and ambition may have been a contributing factor. PAL was developed by Telefunken, a German company, and in the post-war De Gaulle era there would have been much political resistance to dropping a French-developed system and adopting a German-developed one instead.
Unlike some other manufacturers, the company where SECAM was invented, Thomson, still sells TV sets worldwide under different brands; this may be due in part to the legacy of SECAM. Thomson bought the company that developed PAL, Telefunken, and today even co-owns the RCA brand —RCA being the creator of NTSC. Thomson also co-authored the ATSC standard which is used for American high-definition TV.
Why SECAM elsewhere?
The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations. According to this explanation, Western TV was popular in the East, authorities were well aware of this and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black & white, because the underlying TV standards remained essentially the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television". Later East German-produced TV sets even included a dual standard PAL/SECAM decoder. In any case the majority of TV sets in East Germany were monochrome (black & white) until well into the 1980s.
However, PAL and SECAM are just standards for the color sub carrier, used in conjunction with older standards for the base monochrome signals. The names for these monochrome standards are letters, such as M, B/G, D/K, and L. See CCIR, OIRT and FCC (the standardization bodies).
These signals are much more important to compatibility than the color sub carriers are. They differ by AM or FM sound modulation, signal polarisation, relative frequencies within the channel, bandwidth, etc. For example, a PAL D/K TV set will be able to receive a SECAM D/K signal (although in black and white), while it will not be able to decode the sound of a PAL B/G signal. So even before SECAM came to Eastern European countries, most viewers could not have received Western programs —and color TV sets were not exactly widespread in the Communist bloc anyway, so the monochrome-only reception did not pose a significant problem.