First years with his 1931 television set , 27 June 2013 The government operated the sole television channel in France for 28 years. It was created as on 26 April 1935, making it among the oldest television stations in the world, and one of the very few
prewar television stations to remain in existence to the present day. The first public demonstration of a 30-line mechanical television took place on 14 April 1931. The image rendering was an improvement upon Baird's thanks to the development of the "moving light point" system and the use of a camera with Weiller mirror drums by the engineer
René Barthélemy, head of the radio laboratory of the (CdC) of
Montrouge. In charge of French broadcasting, the
PTT administration carried out some rudimentary television experiments from December 1931 by broadcasting experimental 30 to 45 minute broadcasts at variable times from Monday to Saturday with Baird equipment from the medium wave transmitter of Radio PTT. The Barthélemy system was officially adopted in preference to that of Baird, due to the greater stability of the images, for the continuation of experimental transmissions in 1932. The Minister of the
PTT,
Henri Queuille, then authorised the to continue its experiments using the PTT superior school transmitter located at 103 rue de
Grenelle in the
15th arrondissement of Paris and assigned the company a rudimentary studio at number 93 of the same street. Barthélemy continued his experiments there with a new disc camera from Nipkow which offered much better shooting possibilities than with the previous system. The programs were broadcast in 30 lines on Tuesday and Friday at 5:00 pm by two transmitters, the images by the medium wave transmitter of the higher school of the PTT on the wavelength of 431 meters and the sound by the transmitter of the in Montrouge connected to the studio by a telephone line. These experimental broadcasts only reached a very limited public of amateurs of technical innovation who tinkered with receivers connected to a radio, thus constituting a radiovision receiver. At the same time, the
BBC Television Service had been broadcasting an experimental but regular television service since 22 August 1932, with broadcasts taking place Monday to Friday from 11.00 a.m. to 11.30 a.m., and at night on medium wave on 205 meters after BBC radio programmes
closed down for the night. The new French Minister of the
PTT of the Flandin Government,
Georges Mandel, during a visit to the general manager of the
British Broadcasting Corporation at the end of 1934, attended a live broadcast of the
Epsom Derby on a
televisor built by
John Logie Baird. Convinced by this demonstration and of the interest of this invention for the future, but also very aware that the ministerial instability must lead him to quickly imprint his mark on the heavy administration of the
PTT for which he was responsible by modernizing, Georges Mandel decided to inaugurate as soon as possible a regular and experimental public television service in France. In March 1935, he went to the to measure the state of progress of the research. René Barthélemy gave him a demonstration of his new mechanical disc camera with 60 lines of definition (25 images per second), his new telecine (of which he was the inventor) with 180 lines, as well as a receiver with 60 cathode ray tube lines; a tube for which the has just launched production. He also informed him of his ongoing work on a 180-line camera. Pressed to carry out his project, the minister granted Barthélemy the means requested for his success. The amphitheater of the
PTT superior school, located in the premises of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications at 103 , was converted into a television studio on 17 April 1935 and its bleachers were dismantled to enlarge it. The CdC's 60-line mechanical camera was placed in the adjoining room, behind double-thick insulating glass to mask the sound of the motor spinning the camera disk. This same room also housed the 60-line, 500-watt transmitter designed by the . The project provided for a short wave transmitter on the Eiffel Tower and a definition of 180 lines in the long term, as soon as Barthélemy had finalized his work. One thousand guests of the Minister, personalities, journalists and industrialists flocked to the studio at 103 on Friday, 26 April 1935 to attend the first official regular French television broadcast transmitted by radio with a definition of 60 lines3. At 8:15 pm, on the small greenish screen appeared the face of the actress and friend of the minister, , member of the
Comédie-Française, with at her side, Jean Toscane, the most famous voice of Radio
PTT, and René Barthélemy. Lips and eyes made up in black for the needs of television broadcasting, Miss Bretty recounted of her last tour in Italy with the troupe: "We had a great trip...". These were the first words broadcast on French television. This first television program was broadcast live until 8:30pm on the 175-meter medium-wave frequency within a radius of 100 km (60 miles). , the first French television channel, had just been born. began operations on 26 April 1935 as the first television station in France, using a 30-line
mechanical television system based on the
Nipkow disk. It was operated by the
French PTT agency with a transmitter located atop the
Eiffel Tower, and was on air three days a week from 11 am to 11:30 am and 8 pm to 8:30 pm and on Sundays from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. On 4 January 1937, the broadcasting hours were changed such that television programmes were aired from 5 pm until 10 pm on Wednesdays to Fridays, and from 4 pm to 8:30 pm or 9 pm on Saturdays to Tuesdays. Impressed by the sharpness of the 60-line images obtained from the cathode-ray tube control receiver during this broadcast, Georges Mandel gave the
PTT technicians and René Barthélemy six months to set up the necessary installations for regular public broadcasting in 180 lines. Two months late, the official inauguration of 180-line television took place on Sunday, 8 December 1935, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm in front of the press, at the studio at 103, in Paris, with a gala session combining excerpts from plays, comic operas, poems, songs and sketches performed by many famous comedians and music-hall artists invited by , and whose numbers were announced at the screen by , the first official continuity announcer, on the air since June. The studio required 50,000 lux of light to compensate for the insufficient sensitivity of the 180-line mechanical camera with a double-spiral
Nipkow disk rotating at 50 rotations per second. The dissipation of the heat of this very violent lighting was annoying and even dangerous for the artists. This is why a forced-air refrigeration system (temperature and humidity) was installed in the studio to lower its temperature from 55 to 25 °C (130°F to 75°F) by means of six aerators. The images filmed in the studio were routed live by a 2,500 meter (1½ mile) long telephone cable to a new transmitter designed by SFR-CSF and temporarily located at the north pillar of the
Eiffel Tower, from where a feeder connected it to the four 2 kW shortwave transmitting antennas located at the top of the tower 320 meters (1050 feet) high and which can be received 100 km (60 miles) around Paris. The sound was transmitted in medium wave on the frequency of 206 meters (675 feet) by the transmitter of Radio Tour Eiffel. The very large public crowds in front of the receivers installed at the
Conservatoire national des arts et métiers at 292
rue Saint-Martin, at the National Tourist Office on the
Champs-Élysées, at the Salon de la France d'Outre-Mer at the
Grand Palais, at the
Maison de la Chimie, and at the town hall of the
5th arrondissement of Paris, which simultaneously broadcast the images in 180 lines. Indeed, if Barthélemy's Emyvisor from was put on sale at the end of 1935, its price was still exorbitant (8,000 to 10,000 francs at the time, or around 6,000 euros today) and only the privileged few could enjoy television at the time. , new
PTT Minister of the
Popular Front, launched on 24 October 1936 a call for tenders from radio-electric manufacturers in order to provide television with higher definition equipment exploiting the possibilities offered by the
iconoscope and electronic television. Already exploited by the British, Germans and Americans. A test period would enable the best standard to be chosen. The broadcasts became regular from 4 January 1937 with broadcast from 11am to 11:30am and from 8pm to 8:30pm on weekdays and from 5:30pm to 7:30pm on Sundays. The Deputy Secretary General for Broadcasts, , brought the greatest French artists, such as
Sacha Guitry,
Serge Lifar and
Maurice Chevalier, to the cameras of the studio. At that time, there were only about 100 individual television receivers. carried out its tests in 441 lines, the (association of the and SFR-CSF) in 450 lines and Thomson-Houston in
455 lines. The
PTT administration chose the 455-line high-definition equipment manufactured by Thomson for public demonstrations at the 1937 Paris
Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, which was then transferred to the studio for testing.
Radiodiffusion nationale Télévision Following successful trials of a "high-definition" 455-line electronic television system designed by
Thomson-Houston which improved on the 405-line system originally designed by EMI-Marconi, Radio-PTT Vision renamed itself as Radiodiffusion nationale Télévision (RN Télévision) in July 1937. However, broadcasts using the Nipkow disk system continued alongside the new electronic system until 10 April 1938. In July 1938, a decree of the French PTT agency fixed the French terrestrial television standard as transmitting on 455 lines
VHF (46 MHz, positive modulation, 25 frames per second), to be adopted throughout France within three years. The adoption of the electronic standard marked the end of mechanical television in France, and the advent of electronic television to obtain much better image quality. While the BBC Television Service was able to broadcast the arrival of the President of the French Republic
Albert Lebrun in London for his official visit on 21 March 1939, RN Télévision was otherwise unable to film a single image. The Minister of the PTT thus promised on 31 March a bus equipped for
remote reporting in the open air within two weeks, a new television studio and programs broadcast in the evening after dinner. The administrative system of public broadcasting was modified by a decree of 29 July 1939 signed by the President of the Council
Édouard Daladier, making French Broadcasting, and therefore the television service attached to it, a State monopoly which ceased to depend on the Ministry of PTT to pass under the administration of the National French Radio, newly created for this purpose, endowed with an autonomous budget and placed directly under the authority of the President of the council.
World War II The rue de Grenelle studio went on annual vacation on 31 July 1939 and never reopened. Radiodiffusion nationale Télévision then only broadcast films, documentaries and news via its Grammont telecine and identified itself with the callsign Télé-Cinéma Radiodiffusion nationale. When France entered
World War II on 3 September 1939, military authorities ordered the cessation of broadcasts and took control of the Eiffel Tower transmitter. The French hardly noticed it because there were no more than 300 receiving stations throughout the territory, which were also watched in a few rare public places. A few broadcasts were still broadcast episodically for transmitter maintenance purposes, but these were not advertised in the press so that the Germans could not use the transmitter signal to locate and bombard Paris. On 6 June 1940, technicians from RN Télévision sabotaged the transmitter to make it unusable by the Germans who were at the gates of Paris. The German occupying forces initially took no interest in the Eiffel Tower transmitter until an order in May 1941, aimed at reducing transmission sites in the occupied zone in order to recover raw materials, and thus recover certain elements of the French 455-line transmitter of interest to
Telefunken lead to discussions on the rehabilitation and use of this transmitter for television. Opposed to this dismantling, , German television pioneer and former director of the programs of Berlin's
Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow television station, who succeeded in convincing the German authorities to continue the broadcast of the programs of the station during the war by proposing its use to entertain and distract the war wounded in hospitals, took up this idea to apply it to the French capital and thus save the Parisian transmitter. He recommended putting the Eiffel Tower transmitter back into service to broadcast a television channel intended to entertain the German soldiers hospitalized in the
Kriegslazarette in Paris. In addition, this television channel would open up the French market to the German electrical industry by adopting the German 441-line broadcasting standard developed by Telefunken. Finally, from a military point of view, the repair of this transmitter could allow it to be used as a jammer for enemy planes. By order of the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to the Ministry of PTT on 20 May 1942, the work to restore the transmitter in the Eiffel Tower to service was entrusted to the Compagnie des comptes de Montrouge and the German firm Telefunken, following a collaboration agreement between the two companies to jointly build the technical infrastructure of this new television channel. The equipment of the Compagnie des Compteurs being considered uninteresting, Telefunken supplied the new television transmitter to the German standard of 441 lines, recovered from the Reichspost in Germany, and which was installed by technicians from Berlin. Fernsehsender Paris (Paris-Télévision) moved into a large 3,000-seat ballroom, a remnant of the former Magic-City amusement park closed in 1926, unused since the start of the war. This installation made it possible to start the programs on a regular basis on 7 May 1943 only in telecine, because the work on the V-shaped stage, allowing the cameras to be moved back for wider shots, had not been completed. It broadcasts in German and French four days a week from 10 am to noon, three days from 3pm to 8pm and every evening from 8:30pm to 10pm, broadcasting variety shows and theater for field hospitals (Kriegslazarett) of the Wehrmacht installed in the Paris region and German residents in Paris (about 1,000 receivers, including a hundred for French viewers). The station was officially inaugurated on 30 September 1943 with the start of live broadcasts. A week before the
liberation of Paris, Fernsehsender Paris ceased broadcasting on Saturday 12 August 1944 at 11:30 p.m. On 17 August, the order was given to Hinzmann to blow up the Eiffel Tower's transmitter, which he refused, contenting himself with firing a few symbolic shots into unimportant equipment. The Germans left the studios, leaving the French with a fully operational and among the most efficient television station in the world, which enabled French television to be the first in Europe to resume its broadcasts from the old studio and with the equipment from Fernsehsender Paris, from 1 October 1944 intermittently and in closed circuit test transmissions, because the Americans had administered the Eiffel Tower at the time and prohibited the use of its transmitter until 1 October 1945. Television broadcasts in France resumed on 1 October 1944 under the name
Télévision française, and following the creation of
Radiodiffusion française on 23 March 1945, the television service was renamed as RDF Télévision française. Following the return of the Eiffel Tower to the French precisely one year (1 October 1945) after the restart, the official resumption of television broadcasts took place with one hour of programming each day. On 20 November 1948, the Secretary of State for Information,
François Mitterrand, decreed the adoption of the
819-line high-definition VHF standard, which was in use from 1949 until 1983.
RTF Télévision "
819-line test card used in France from 1953 to 1983. This variant was also used in
French Algeria from 1956 to 1962.
Radiodiffusion française was renamed as
Radiodiffusion-télévision française (RTF) on 9 February 1949, and thus began the growth of television as an accepted mass medium in France. RTF was also the first channel in the world to air footage of a Pope, on 17 April 1949, with a film sent from the
Vatican of
Pope Pius XII talking about the potential of television. On 29 May 1949, the first news programme aired on RTF TV, and on 30 July 1949 a
television licence fee was introduced. Residents living outside Paris could view RTF TV for the first time in February 1952 when Télé Lille (now known as
France 3 Nord-Pas-de-Calais), a regional broadcaster operating since 10 April 1950, was co-opted into the RTF TV network and became RTF's first relay outside Paris. Still as of 1954, RTF's terrestrial network consisted of only three stations reaching 90,000 television sets, while
West Germany had set up nine stations by year-end 1953. Its programming was also seen to be stale, with an excessive amount of old movies (120 per year), "stale" newsreels, poor lighting, lack of sport and star performers. Famed French singer of the time
Maurice Chevalier actually made his first television appearance in the United Kingdom, as opposed to France. RTF television services were also extended to
French Algeria in 1956, which later became
TV1 Algeria upon
Algerian independence in 1962.
ORTF era Following the creation of
RTF Télévision 2 (now
France 2) in 1964, the first channel was renamed as
Première chaîne de la RTF (First Channel of the RTF). With the creation of the
ORTF on 25 July 1964, the channel was renamed again to ''Première chaîne de l'ORTF
(First Channel of the ORTF). This period marked the introduction of commercial advertising on 1 October 1968. On 8 January 1969, the ORTF created a subsidiary company called '' (RFP) to handle all advertising on the ORTF channels. The RFP held a monopoly on French TV advertising until the launch of privately owned TV channels in France in the 1980s, and was eventually liquidated in 1993.
TF1 era Public-owned (1975–1987) TF1, which originally stood for
Télévision française 1 (French Television 1), was created on 1 January 1975 when law 74-696 of 7 August 1974, splitting the ORTF into seven separate organisations, came into effect. The name TF1 was a recommendation of the
European Broadcasting Union, who demanded the television unit of the former ORTF rebranded as
Télévision Française, with the channels being renamed TF1, TF2 and TF3. However, the fact that the three channels were to be independent caused TF1 to become the only channel to use the proposed Télévision Française name. The rebranding to the new name came into effect on 6 January 1975. TF1 adopted a multicoloured logo and cel-animated idents created by , and from 1976 until 1985, analogue computer-generated idents produced using the
Scanimate system were also used, created by the American company
Robert Abel and Associates with background music composed by
Vladimir Cosma. The 1975 TF1 logo was later modified in 1984 and again in 1987. Colour television was first introduced to TF1 on 1 September 1975 when FR3 (now
France 3) agreed to supply some of its colour programming to TF1, and the conversion to colour on TF1 was completed in 1977, though the old 819-line analogue network remained entirely black-and-white until it was decommissioned in 1983. Since TF1's privatisation in April 1987, the abbreviation is no longer expanded, so as to avoid confusion with the current public television broadcaster
France Télévisions.
Private-owned (1987–present) From 1984 to 1986, the French television landscape evolved significantly with the launch of three private television channels:
Canal+,
La Cinq and
TV6. In March 1986, the decided to privatize one of the three public channels. Although initial reports had suggested Antenne 2 (now France 2), on 14 May the government announced that TF1 was selected. The channel was therefore more apt to confront with competition, but still considered left-leaning by the right-wing majority. In April 1987, the construction conglomerate
Bouygues won the resulting auction for the sale of TF1. On 16 April, its president,
Francis Bouygues, presented a check of three billion
francs to the government, completing the privatisation of TF1. TF1's current logo was unveiled on February 2nd, 1990. It launched a news network,
La Chaîne Info (LCI), in 1994. The channel was available in Italy alongside LCI on
digital terrestrial television from 2004 to December 2006 on
Dfree multiplex. In 2005, TF1 launched TF1 Vision, a video on demand service. On 20 May 2021, it was announced that TF1 Group, owners of the channel, proposed a merger with Groupe M6, which owns
M6. On 16 September 2022, it was announced that the merger was officially abandoned. Since October 2022, the free DTT channels of the TF1 Group have been accessible free to air via the Astra 1 satellite. This broadcast follows a temporary interruption in encrypted broadcasting to Canal+ and TNTSAT subscribers, following a commercial dispute. However, despite the resumption of encrypted broadcasts within the Canal+ and TNTSAT bouquets, this free-to-air broadcasting continues. LCI is therefore received free of charge in almost all of continental Europe. On 23 November 2024,
Sky News reported that
CVC Capital Partners, TF1,
RedBird Capital Partners,
All3Media,
Mediawan and
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts had been linked to a potential takeover bid for
ITV plc and a possible break-up of core assets such as
ITV Studios and
ITVX. This could see TF1 name launched in UK. == Logo history TF1 ==