...analog video (whether PAL, NTSC or SECAM) had extremely high standards and convoluted specifications and i wonder whether there's anything using it now, or if it's been re- purposed i.e. any reason for it to still exist.
Yes broadcast-standard analog video had "extremely high standards" back in their day. But this is the 21st century and the same (or more likely better) quality can be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost with modern technology.
Agreed that it was a marvelously clever invention to encode the monochrome and then color video onto a "serial" analog signal stream. But here in the digital age it doesn't seem like very "convoluted specifications". Everything else is moving on to "better, faster, cheaper" why should video be any different?
I still have several pieces of analog video gear hanging around and it is rather painful to just dump it into the waste-stream, but dunno what benefit anyone would get from it here in 2018.
I curate an
imaginary "museum" of some of my favorite communications gear. Two of the featured "exhibits", one from the late 1800s is the gas-fired Mergenthaler Linotype machine. A very impressive mechanical engineering masterpiece. But made completely obsolete by photo-typesetting in the late 1900s, and then by computer-based methods to this day.
And the second item is the marvelous Ampex quadruplex video tape recorder. The tape deck as big as a traditional side-by-side washer and dryer, and requiring three 6-foot racks bristling with hundreds of tubes. Quite amazing that the fiddly and complex thing worked so well for decades.
But that was then and this is now. It is proper to be impressed by that old technology, but today we aren't limited by the technology of our parents and grandparents.