Abstract: There is disclosed herein a television system wherein television signals are scrambled or otherwise encoded at the transmitting facility and then unscrambled or decoded at the receiving facility, typically a home television subscriber. The television signals have a number of video fields inverted as transmitted, and these fields are reinverted by the home decoder. The normal sync pulses of a television signal are replaced with burst flags coded in the video portion of the signal. The decoder senses these burst flags and recreates conventional sync so that a composite video signal can be provided to the television receiver. The system includes a relatively simple string of decade counters and associated logic for determining which video fields are to be reinverted. The decoder is switchable, as with a suitable card or switches, to set the same for properly decoding the video.