Originally posted by Famine
The only other TV standard I know of is in France, called "SECAM", but it wasn't terribly popular, and they tend to use PAL.
PAL is not the "worldwide standard"... It's the Western Europe, Asia & Australia standard.
NTSC is used in plenty places -- US, Canada, Mexico (and the rest of North & Central America), Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, the Philippines and parts of South America.
SECAM (Sequential Couleur Avec Memoire) is still used in France a lot, and it's the standard in Russia, much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and parts of West Africa. Outside France, it's actually a slightly different format called MESECAM. SECAM TV's will work fine with PAL input, but the color will be off.
Brazil has PAL-M, which is the same as NTSC, but it has PAL's color coding.
Black & White TV was such a simple concept. Take signal, put signal on screen at a speed in sync with the AC current. NTSC & PAL were developed as clever ways to broadcast color signals that were still compatible with B&W TV's. NTSC is from 1954. It had slightly unstable color, and PAL/SECAM were developed in 1967 with better color coding, but all standards have good color on modern TV's.
Luckily, HDTV will eventually take all that over. AFAIK, all HDTV's are compatible with 1080/24p, 1080/60i and 1080/50i. And I know all the newer Sony HDTV's also support NTSC, PAL and SECAM.