III, with the latter being presented at the 1965 CCIR General Assembly in Vienna, and adopted by France and the Soviet Union. Soviet technicians were involved in a separate development of the standard, creating an incompatible variant called NIIR or SECAM IV, which was not deployed. The team was working in Moscow's Telecentrum under the direction of Professor Pavel Vasilyevich Shmakov. The NIIR designation comes from the name of the Nautchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Radio (NIIR, rus. Научно-Исследовательский Институт Радио), a Soviet research institute involved in the studies. Two standards were developed: Non-linear NIIR, in which a process analogous to gamma correction is used, and Linear NIIR or SECAM IV that omits this process. SECAM IV was proposed by France and USSR at the 1966 Oslo CCIR conference and demonstrated in London. Further improvements were SECAM III A, followed by SECAM III B, the system adopted for general use in 1967. Tested until 1963 on the second french national network "la deuxième chaîne ORTF", the SECAM standard was adopted in France and launched on 1 October 1967, now called France 2. A group of four suited men—a presenter (Georges Gorse, Minister of Information) and three contributors to the system's development—were shown standing in a studio. Following a count from 10, at 2:15 pm the black-and-white image switched to color; the presenter then declared "Et voici la couleur !" (fr: And here is color!) The same year, CLT of Lebanon became the third television station in the world, after the Soviet Central Television and France 2, to broadcast in color utilizing the French SECAM technology. 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 in 1968, 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 US.In March 1969 East Germany decided to adopt SECAM IIIB. The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations. According to this explanation, East German political authorities were well aware of West German television's popularity and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black and white, because the underlying TV standards remained essentially the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying