For backward compatibility with black-and-white television, NTSC uses a luminance-chrominance encoding system invented in 1938 by Georges Valensi. The three color picture signals are divided into Luminance (derived mathematically from the three separate color signals (Red, Green and Blue))[32] which takes the place of the original monochrome signal and Chrominance which carries only the color information. This process is applied to each color source by its own Colorplexer,[33][34] thereby allowing a compatible color source to be managed as if it were an ordinary monochrome source. This allows black-and-white receivers to display NTSC color signals by simply ignoring the chrominance signal. Some black-and-white TVs sold in the U.S. after the introduction of color broadcasting in 1953 were designed to filter chroma out, but the early B&W sets did not do this and chrominance could be seen as a 'dot pattern' in highly colored areas of the picture, called dot crawl.[35]
NTSC and PAL also deliver color information, along with the definition of a moving picture. You can think of this process as the ability to separate the shapes, or what we call luminance or brightness, from the color content, or chrominance, usually hue and saturation.