PAL region

The PAL region is a television publication territory that covers most of Europe and Africa, alongside parts of Asia, South America and Oceania. It is named PAL because of the PAL (Phase Alternating Line) television standard traditionally used in some of those regions, as opposed to the NTSC standard traditionally used in Japan and most of North America.

This term came into use with the introduction of home video releases, followed later by DVD-Video and other video playback devices.

More recently, as most countries have stopped using the PAL standard entirely in favor of newer digital standards such as DVB, the term "PAL region" in video gaming means the list of regions it had covered in the past. For this context, PAL region usually corresponds to Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Middle East, India, and South Africa. This also allows publishers to implement a form of regional lockout on titles.

Other marketing region definitions are designated as, for example, PAL-A, PAL-B, NTSC-C, NTSC-J or NTSC-U.