And at a meeting, our CEO asked if we had any other ideas for the product. And so I said that if we just add a couple of counters inside, we could make a pattern generator that could be useful for "various purposes". He said that should be ok, if indeed it was "just a couple of counters" and didn’t make the chip a testing nightmare.
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I actually came to the lab during the weekend and wrote the configuration for a minimalistic NTSC modulator on that tiny CPLD. When our CEO saw it, he asked if we could fit it inside our IC. And I said, sure, its something like 10 to 20 flip-flops. But with a little more, we could make it much better. He asked how much better, and I said full color (my demo had 14 colors - sync level, burst level and 14 indexed colors formed with VHDL combinatorial logic statements). Of course we would need to put a DAC inside, but no problem, our company is expert with DACs.

I thought this was odd, and potentially useful, but as it's 3V only it's just a little off-topic.

Not only video, apparently - it can also be used as an audio buffer or one channel of a wavetable synth. And not only *composite* video; put three of them together and you can have an analogue VGA/RGB output, though I haven't yet worked out how best to produce the separate sync signals.

They have another chip for that: http://www.vlsi.fi/en/products/vs23s040.html

It has a four channel output that can do RGB...