Color television is a television transmission technology that includes information on the color of the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It is considered an improvement on the earliest television technology, monochrome or black-and-white television, in which the image is displayed in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world upgraded from black-and-white to color transmission between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television during much of the war. In August 1944, Baird gave the world's first demonstration of a practical fully electronic color television display. In the United States, commercially competing color standards were developed, finally resulting in the NTSC standard for color that retained compatibility with the prior monochrome system. Although the NTSC color standard was proclaimed in 1953 and limited programming became available, it was not until the early 1970s that color television in North America outsold black-and-white or monochrome units. Color broadcasting in Europe was not standardized on the PAL and SECAM formats until the 1960s.