European Equivalents of Legacy (ex-analogue) UK channels

I know this is a bit trivial, but I was wondering if these are roughly the equivalents of the UK channels in some European channels.

France
BBC One - France 2
BBC Two - France 3
ITV1 - TF1
Channel 5 - M6

RoI
BBC One - RTE One
BBC Two - RTE Two
ITV1 - Virgin Media One
S4C - TG4

Germany
BBC One - Das Erste
ITV1 - RTL
Channel 4 - ZDF
Channel 5 - ProSieben
S4C - 'channel 3' (regional channels)

Italy
BBC One - Rai 1
BBC Two - Rai 2/Rai 3
ITV1 - Canal 5
Channel 5 - La7

Belgium
BBC One - La Une
BBC Two - La Deux
ITV1 - RTL-TVI

Denmark
BBC One - DR 1
BBC Two - DR 2
ITV1 - ? (TV2 is a weird case because it has the feel of ITV1 but ownership-wise, it looks like Channel 4. What do you think?)
Channel 5 - TV3

Spain
BBC One - La 1
BBC Two - La 2
ITV1 - Antenna 3
Channel 5 - Telecinco

Sweden
BBC One - SVT1
BBC Two - SVT2
ITV1 - TV4
Channel 5 - TV3

Did I miss anything or are there other equivalents that you wish to suggest?

I suspect this is kind of fraught with difficulty. It depends how you define equivalent - as the genre mix and heritage of BBC One, BBC Two, ITV and C4 are all pretty distinctive to the UK and don't map so well into other countries.

TF1 was effectively the first TV channel in France - or the descendant of it - so arguably TF1 was the equivalent of BBC One, and Antenne 2 (which became France 2) was the equivalent of BBC Two (as it was the '2nd' channel and launched 625 not 819 lines)

You could strongly argue that TV2 in Denmark was the equivalent of BBC Two (as DR2 is a pretty recent development)

As for ARD/Das Erste and ZDF in Germany, I don't think they really map into BBC One / BBC Two / C4 at all neatly.

Plus the regionality issue on public service channels (France 3 and the German third channels that carry regional content vs BBC One having regional opt-outs, DR has no TV regional news, TV2 does etc.) are difficult to map too.

And Belgium - you really need to consider both language territories - not just the Francophone?

Interesting take. I was looking at them more in terms of the intended audience of the content that they broadcast (mainstream, specialist) and ownership structure (private, commercial).

TF1, BBC One, and TV2 Denmark do get similar ratings relative to their respective competitors though.

FWIW, I may be wrong but if BBC One and ITV1 are competitors to each other as they're intended to be mainstream channels, BBC Two and Channel 4 seem to be competitors to each other in that they have more specialist content. Further, I believe ITV1 came before BBC Two.

Yes - ITV came before BBC Two (it launched 405 not 625, though it was Band III not Band I so you needed a new aerial and/or TV or bolt-on adaptor in many cases to receive it), but if you are looking at the Danish context, it's difficult to map the channels. DR2 is still really new, and TV2 is much closer to a BBC or C4 channel than ITV as it's government-owned and much more public service than ITV?

I think the reality is that it's really difficult to try and map other countries' channels to a UK context, as they don't exist in a UK context. In Sweden, for instance, there were no domestic commercial TV channels for many, many years (TV3 was beamed in from the UK to get round the Swedish commercial TV rules), and TV4 (which you can kind of equate to ITV in being the main commercial network in Sweden, didn't exist until 30+ years after ITV started in the UK)

Plus the heritage of channels is different, and many countries, like the UK, Sweden, France, Norway, Denmark etc. launched TV services with just a single channel doing all content. Two of the three Scandinavian countries (Sweden is an exception) for many years only had one channel broadcast by their main public service broadcaster, with secondary and tertiary channels only launching once multichannel satellite and then digital TV was launched (DR2 & NRK2 only launched in 1996 for instance) and have far less unque identities and heritage than BBC Two for instance, which launched 30 years earlier.

SVT2 started in a very different way to BBC Two (for years the then 'TV2' in Sweden was encouraged to compete with the original SVT 'Kanal 1' service, and they were editorially independent of each other within Sveriges Radio/Television, and TV2 (these days branded SVT2) - was more popular than the first channel, and was able to carry regional content (Kanal 1 was VHF, TV2 - like BBC Two - was UHF and thus more regionalised). It wasn't until TV4 launched in Sweden in the 90s that SVT2 stopped being the most popular channel in Sweden, and the two channels were revamped and became much more integrated with each other.

You have a point there. I'm beginning to think Rai, Das Erste, ZDF, and TV2 Denmark, and a lot of government-owned channels may in some ways resemble Channel 4 than BBC One/Two in that ads make up a larger portion of their revenue.

Agree that SVT2 started out as a competitor to SVT1,

Not sure what 'public service' programmes come out of TV2 to make it resemble BBC One/Two/C4 though. Also, they have an extremely restrictive paywall for a 'public' broadcaster: one has to even pay to receive the audio feed of their sister news channel. And that's not all: you're out of luck if you don't carry a danish debit/credit card.

Lucky for Britain that as early as the 60s, it featured up to three TV channels. In some European countries, their version of ITV1 did not arrive until the 1990s. Perhaps this may be the reason why pay-TV penetration in most of continental Europe (except Italy perhaps) seems much higher than it is in the UK.

Pay TV penetration is rather small even in countries like Germany, (especially), Spain.

Actually the higher the population of a country is, the more likely to have a higher number free TV channels is.

Don't lump together countries like Denmark, Sweden, Portugal with much bigger Germany, France etc.

Thinking about Germany, it might have come late to the commercial TV sector, but now, it's one of the countries where free TV is available almost everywhere.
Just look at how many free TV German-speaking channels there are on Astra.

France has many paying TV channels, as well, but not as many as Germany, and it's a more restrictive market for international companies.

Italy has a lot of free TV channels too.
Spain is similar, and doesn't have a very established pay TV market

Poland is in a middle position, with its almost 40 millions inhabitants

Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Nordic countries etc. all smaller countries, are the ones which depend much more on paying TV, since the size of the market probably is too small to justify a great amount of free TV channels .

Russia and neighbouring bilingual Russian speaking terrritories also has a rich free TV market and small pay TV penetration

This is a fun exercise, although it is obviously hard to establish firm equivalents. One can spot similarities between broadcasters, but should also be aware that their relative position in each country is affected by the history and structure their TV markets.

First off, both ITV and Channel 4 are special cases shaped by UK broadcasting history so there are few direct equivalents in other countries. The only thing resembling an equivalent to Channel 4 would be SBS in Australia.

There's no real equivalent to ITV in terms of its regional history, but in terms of being "the undisputedly largest legacy commercial PSB channel", then MTV Finland, TV2 Norway, TV4 Sweden and arguably TV2 Denmark fit the bill. TF1 is a special case, for reasons stated above.

Some countries like Spain and Portugal launched multiple private networks within a short timeframe, meaning they each don't have the broader (commercial) audience for themselves like ITV does. Saying Telecinco is Spain's Channel 5 doesn't work for this reason.

Many European countries had a successful rollout of cable in the 80s. Some (Germany and the Netherlands) never got into licensing full scale commercial terrestrial TV networks for this reason. But RTL Germany and RTL4 in the Netherlands probably match ITV in terms of their firm positions as the leading commercial channels. The wide availability of cable also blurred the line between terrestrial and cable, meaning it is hard to say TV3 and Kanal 5 in Sweden and Denmark are equivalents of Channel 5 or Sky One in the UK.

Channel 5 should probably be defined by its late entrance into a maturing market. Nelonen in Finland and to some extent M6 in France fit that position. TVNorge wasn't as late an entrant, but has some similarities.

Italy and Greece are special cases, taking a more "wild west" approach to terrestrial broadcasting.

As for state-owned PSBs and equivalents to BBC One and Two: You can either have one unified company that coordinates its channels (if they have more than one) or have two or more more autonomous channels. The latter has historically been the case for TF1/A2/FR3 in France and arguably for DR/TV2 in Denmark and TV1/TV2 in Sweden.

ARD/ZDF in Germany is still organised this way. ARD and ZDF are different organisations, but they are completely equal as channels. Saying ZDF is Channel 4 is arguably wrong. If anything, they are both BBC One. Historically, this structure meant that both channels were a mix of BBC One and Two, although much of the "Twoier" content has been shifted to the Dritte and satellite channels.

Many European PSBs have emulated the BBC One/Two dichotomy, with various asterisks. One is Austria, where the situation is flipped so that ORF2 is the closest equivalent to BBC One and ORF1 targets younger viewers. The Dutch used to have mixed-up channels, but recently organised them so that NPO1 and NPO2 are clearly similar to BBC One and Two, respectively.

I think Germany's commercial channels are encrypted on DTT and require a monthly fee to watch?

No, they don't, you're probably confusing Germany with Denmark or s'th else

Said that, DTT is not a widespread way of watching TV in Germany

Though isn't TV2 Denmark technically a public TV channel?

France is a unique case as it is the only country in Europe with public TV channels that I know of that puts a commercial TV station in the 'channel 1' position.

Luxembourg does not have BBC/C4 equivalents. It's the only country I know of in the world that has not had a history of any public broadcasting to the degree that its European neighbours had. Even weirder is that many of the FTA channels airing there are clearly intended for the Netherlands, where the same channels require a paid subscription to watch and given that the Netherlands does not even border Luxembourg.

TV2 Denmark is also a bit of a special case, hence the qualifier "arguably". When it launched in 1988 it was more like a traditional public broadcaster, received a large portion of its funding from the license fee and had advertising handled by a separate company. It still differed substantively from DR, but they were closer to the ARD/ZDF situation than they are now. In the '90s TV2 started transitioning to a more typical commercial PSB, sold its own advertising and stopped receiving license fee money, with the intent of eventually going completely private.

It is now very similar to its Nordic colleagues or ITV or TF1. The only difference is that it is still owned by the government. TV2 has been for sale for almost two decades now. They themselves have repeatedly expressed that they would be happy to get sold and are mostly going about as if they were a private PSB. The problem is that selling a major broadcaster is hard and no Danish government has been able to pull the trigger yet.