This is interesting as it highlights how easily we lose arts. You could tune PAL video on cheap Brooktree ASICs 25 years ago, and code for decoding PAL video on the USRP has been available forever.
Brooktree was effectively spun off as Conexant, who made direct successors to many of those ASICs for quite a while including updated single-chip USB and PCIe versions. I don't think they're still around now that analog broadcast is dead though.