I looked up the passage about the proposed "French ITV" in Ruth Thomas' book, in the chapter discussing the establishment of France's third channel:
"Two other solutions [proposed by the 1970 Paye Report] were more in the nature of compromises between private and public systems. One, on the lines of ITV in Great Britain but incorporating the recommendations of the Pilkington Report, comprised a number of private regional companies held together by a national company with mixed private and public capital (société d'économie mixte). Again, Paye rejected this as incompatible with the monopoly."
Ultimately, the French government gave the third channel to ORTF. It became France Régions 3 (FR3) after ORTF was broken up, and is today known as France 3.
I
Germany licensed stations on a city-by-city basis in the 80s, but these were mainly rebroadcasts of satellite stations and never became a national (terrestrial) network. And then there was Italy, who in the 70s allowed an unmanageable network of local stations to sprawl.
Italy had the most deregulated TV market in Europe, which is the reason cable and satellite TV were very late to catch on there. (Unfortunately it also later led to Mediaset essentially buying most of the local stations out to create its national networks), Germany, on the other hand, terrified of allowing the federal government any involvment in broadcasting, gave power over broadcasting solely to the states. Even ZDF is collectively owned by the states rather than by the federal government. That's why commercial TV there developed on cable and satellite initially. To my mind ARD however resembles what a fully state-run ITV would look like and is possibly the nearest equivalent to it in any other country.
As for Ireland, commercial TV was an afterthought on legislation that was really aimed at replacing the pirate radio industry (which was essentially unregulated) with an ILR system that would be under heavy touch regulation (it was, and pretty much still is, a carbon copy of the old IBA regime but without the transmission element - this being while Thatcher was already planning to deregulate in the UK!). What happened though, is that once the television programme contractor, TV3, was selected, it took them nine more years to put together the finance needed to go on air, so that it was 1998, a full ten years after the Radio and Television Act 1988 was enacted.
It is also long forgotten that the regional nature of the ITV network was not originally explicitly planned, but was a consequence of the ITA having to square an obligation to have competition for the supply of programmes to the network with only being allowed enough frequencies for one TV network. This is where the weekday/weekend split, where four companies shared the original three ITV regions also comes form.
Germany, on the other hand, terrified of allowing the federal government any involvment in broadcasting, gave power over broadcasting solely to the states. Even ZDF is collectively owned by the states rather than by the federal government.
Indeed. That's also the key reason why Germany didn't get privately-owned, commercial television in the early '60s, when Chancellor Adenauer wanted to create a commercial TV channel. David Southern's chapter in
Adenauer to Kohl: The Development of the German Chancellorship
picks it up from there:
"Adenauer, dealing direct with commercial interest groups, had promised them a second, commercial channel. The Bundesrat, representing the Land [i.e. state] governments, refused to pass the necessary legislation. In 1961 Adenauer, deciding to press ahead regardless, [...] set in hand the administrative arrangements for a commercial second channel by establishing a private company, in which the federal government held one share."
The channel was supposed to begin broadcasting on January 1, 1961, but it never saw the light of day. The leftist SPD-run states opposed it, and the German Constitutional Court ultimately ruled the channel illegal because broadcasting was supposed to fall under the auspices of the states rather than Adenauer's federal government.
The states decided to establish ZDF instead, and Germany had to wait more than 20 years for privately owned, fully commercial television.
According to the German Wikipedia, the channel, known as FFG, would have...
...had a morning show beginning at 6 A.M. -- that was truly unheard-of in Europe back in 1961!
...aired an evening newscast titled
Weltschau
at 7:30 P.M and again at 10 P.M.
...been consulted by CBS on programming conception and production. (Using American consultants was also ahead of its time.)
All in all, this is one of the most interesting "what-could-have-beens" in European TV history.
Last edited by WW Update on 9 July 2013 6:22pm - 6 times in total
Was the UK years ahead of most of countries in Europe by having a commercial television station? I know Eire took a while, but I get the feeling Germany, France, even Sweden took a while to catch on.
Finland's first commercial TV station, TES-TV, was actually launched precisely four months before ITV. Initiated by the Finnish Radio Engineering Workshop, the station was launched to viewers of experimental cable networks in the nation's largest cities. Its content was mainly made up of infomercials and programming paid for by different workshops and foundations around Southern Finland.
The station and its sister channel, Tamvisio (Tampere), got into financial trouble in 1965 and were bought by Yle. The stations became to form the national public service channel TV2.
I was just rereading Timothy Green's excellent
The Universal Eye: World Television in the Seventies
because of this thread, and found a passage about Finland's Mainos-TV, another early commercial TV channel. Mainos-TV was established in 1957; this is how it operated in 1972, when Timothy Green's book was written:
"All the Scandinavians depend on importing up to fifty per cent of their programmes, although they have largely avoided the cheapest American screen-fodder. The exception is Mainos-TV, the commercial company operated by Finnish industry, banks, advertising agencies and insurance companies, which provides the programmes for part of each evening on both the Finnish Broadcasting Company's channels. Mainos-TV originates forty-nine percent of its own programmes but otherwise buys almost exclusively American series; in 1969 ninety-four per cent of their serials time was filled with American programmes -- the remaining six percent were French. The Finnish Broadcasting Company itself purchases about half its foreign programmes from the United States and a third from Britain."
Mainos-TV got its own channel in the 1980s. It's now known as MTV3 and is Finland's largest commercial TV broadcaster.
(BTW, I hope I won't wear out my welcome in this thread with all these book quotes! )
Last edited by WW Update on 10 July 2013 12:17am - 2 times in total
To my mind ARD however resembles what a fully state-run ITV would look like and is possibly the nearest equivalent to it in any other country.
Below is a map of the broadcasters that make up ARD -- it indeed resembles the ITV system from the time when the individual ITV broadcasters were still individually owned. (Of course, the ARD broadcasters are public bodies owned by the various German states, whereas the ITV stations were private. And the ARD broadcasters operate radio services in addition to TV.) As you can see, a number of German states --
Laender
-- have their own ARD broadcasters, while in some cases, several states share a single broadcaster.
And here is a 2009 compilation of local and regional newscasts from these ARD stations, beginning with ARD's national news (produced in Hamburg on behalf of all the broadcasters, a bit like ITN in ITV's decentralized era):
Last edited by WW Update on 10 July 2013 12:05am - 2 times in total
:-(
A former member
I never released that ARD is the biggest public broadcaster be hide BBC. How did ARD expand to cover East German? Did it, or did it take over other station?
Im still wonder why France never had proper private station, not Ch6? films?
I never released that ARD is the biggest public broadcaster be hide BBC. How did ARD expand to cover East German? Did it, or did it take over other station?
DFF, the East German state broadcaster, joined ARD upon reunfication, and immediately replaced programmes on DFF1 with Das Erste. DFF2 continued broadcasting as before, but this could only ever be a temporary solution, as DFF was now owned by the federal government and as I mentioned above the German constitution prohibits the federal government from being involved in broadcasting within Germany. Therefore the new eastern states were given time to form broadcasting corporations owned by the states and once ORB and MDR were in being, they took over DFF transmitters and DFF was dissolved.
Quote:
Im still wonder why France never had proper private station, not Ch6? films?
They did eventually once Canal+ came along, although their terrestrial station was (and is) paritially a pay-TV channel, one of the very few to broadcast on analogue terrestrial and make a success of it. La 5 came along after (until it went bankrupt and its frequences were taken over by what became France 5/Arte) and M6 later still.
I never released that ARD is the biggest public broadcaster be hide BBC.
I suppose that whether you consider ARD or ZDF the EU's second largest broadcaster depends on how you classify ARD. Even though people tend to think of it as a single entity, it's actually an association of the eight public broadcasters shown on the map above, all of which are managed independently. They pool their programming and operate joint TV services (although each of them also operates at least one TV channel on its own), but their radio operations are mostly regional.
How did ARD expand to cover East German? Did it, or did it take over other station?
This is such a complicated story, and I'm sketchy on the details, so I'll just quote Wikipedia:
Quote:
Upon reunification on 3 October 1990, the DFF ceased to be the state broadcaster of the former GDR. Because the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany reserves broadcasting as a matter for the German states (Länder), the Federal Government was not permitted to continue to run a broadcasting service. Article 36 of the Unification Treaty (Einigungsvertrag) between the two German states (signed on 31 August 1990) required that DFF was to be dissolved by 31 December 1991 and that the former West German television broadcasting system be extended to replace it.
On 15 December 1990, the ARD's Das Erste channel took over the frequencies of DFF1. Das Erste had regional opt-outs during the first part of the evening, but the former GDR did not have ARD broadcasters to fill these spaces. Therefore, DFF continued to provide programmes until 31 December 1991 in these slots:
Landesschau for Brandenburg (originally LSB aktuell)
Nordmagazin for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
Tagesbilder for Saxony-Anhalt
Bei uns in Sachsen for Saxony
Thüringen Journal for Thuringia
Employees of the DFF were worried about job prospects in the new broadcasters and also had a loyalty to the DFF. Viewers, accustomed to the DFF's programming, were concerned at the loss of favourite shows and the choice most viewers had between West and East channels. The new Länder considered keeping a form of DFF running as the equivalent to the ARD members' "third programme" in other regions. However, political opinion was against centralisation and in favour of the new devolved system brought in from the west.
Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia agreed to pool their broadcasts into Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), an ARD member broadcaster based in Leipzig. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, and Berlin considered pooling their broadcasts into Nordostdeutschen Rundfunkanstalt - Northeast German Broadcasting (NORA). Another alternative was for Brandenburg and Berlin to consolidate and for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to have its own broadcaster.
No agreement could be reached between the three Länder; Mecklenburg therefore joined the existing Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), while the existing Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) expanded to the whole of the city and a new broadcaster, Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB) was launched for Brandenburg.
DFF finally ended on 31 December 1991. The new organisations began transmissions the next day, on 1 January 1992. On 1 May 2003, SFB and ORB merged to form Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB).
Im still wonder why France never had proper private station, not Ch6? films
You mean before the 1980s? In the 1950s, '60s, '70s, most European countries maintained public service monopolies for political and cultural reasons, and French governments had long considered TV broadcasting as too valuable a political tool to open it up to the opposition and other political and commercial entities. (Radio, with its "peripheral stations," was a somewhat different story.) Some Gaullists even argued that because the newspapers were largely hostile to them, it was only right that television should lean towards the government's view of major political issues.
But France did get private television in the 1980s: The subscription service Canal Plus, showing mostly films, signed on in 1984, while Le Cinq (which went out of business several years later) and TV6 (later M6) followed in 1986. Finally, 1987 saw the privatization of TF1, which had began its existence as ORTF's first network. As some commented at the time, this was a bit like privatizing BBC1.
In today's digital era, France has dozens of private, fully commercial TV channels, including three private 24-hour news channels (more than any European country I'm aware of).
BTW, here is the ident used by the former East German broadcaster DFF after reunification and after it had been partially integrated into the ARD system as a regional service for the new German states (
Länderkette
means "The States' Network" or "The Network for the States"), but before it was shut down in December 1991 and replaced by its successor broadcasters:
And this is how BFBS in Germany looked on the air in 1985 -- the clip includes an overview of the afternoon's programming, the BSFB clock, the ITN
News at One
, the weather forecast for Germany, the clock again, and the afternoon closedown:
(The clip above gives you some idea of why I, having been used to the bold and brash style of American TV, thought that British continuity announcers sounded strangely sleepy and lethargic when I first saw British TV. ).
For a while (between 1985 and 1997, according to Wikipedia), the British Forces Broadcasting Service was known as SSVC Television. Here's a clip of its BBC1-like globe from 1992:
And here's SSVC's test pattern from 1986, with audio from BFBS Radio:
Now that we've seen continuity from the British Forces Broadcasting Service, let's take a quick look at its American counterpart from that era -- the American Forces Network in Germany. Just as the BFBS's continuity was very British, AFN -- the beginning of the news in this case -- feels unmistakably American:
...had a morning show beginning at 6 A.M. -- that was truly unheard-of in Europe back in 1961!
)