The answer is a bit more complex when it comes to the transition to modern high definition television. It's a bit of a long story with very interesting twists and turns that involve politics, national security, the Pentagon, US Congress and none other than Donald Rumsfeld (CIA and Defense Secretary).

The story is well chronicled in a book I read about twenty years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Governme...

The title is intriguing enough:

"Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television"

I can't possibly do it justice here. I'll just mention that one would not be wrong to call Donald Rumsfeld the father of high definition television. His approach to wrangling the ATSC and FCC into adopting a cornucopia of standards was, from a business perspective, nothing less than genius while, from a technical perspective, a complete mess. The fractional frame rates would have evaporated from this planet had it not been for this part of the story.

Well worth reading for anyone interested in the technology or working in associated industries. Your jaw will most definitely drop as you get deeper into the story.

If you want a more complete (although dry) overview of how we got from NHK's MUSE to the USA's NTSC-8VSB / MPEG-2 system, the book Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television is a good resource:

https://www.amazon.com/Defining-Vision-Broadcasters-Governme...

The TLDR is that the USA took so damn long to make up their minds about a standard (while cleverly keeping the spectrum tied up and away from others that wanted it) that digital coding and compression was able to develop and mature into a system that worked. MUSE was an analog standard that would never fit into a single channel in the US system.