English TV Abroad

Sorry for the late reply.
That must have been pirates, I don't know which actually. First legal commercial channel was, in a U-turn construction from Luxembourg, RTL-Véronique (now RTL4), in 1988 (or 89). The public broadcasting system is indeed complicated over here, but since all broadcasters are united in EBU and under strict legal control, we can exclude public broadcasters doing it.
Law-abiding Netherlands? In the 80's there were loads of pirate radio-channels. Like Radio Veronica, still existing today but now legalised (even tried, with success, to become a public broadcaster, due to our system). Now it is a commercial channel.

I had a look, and there were tv pirates in the Netherlands. They 'hijacked' the signals of the public broadcasters to broadcast, as Wikipedia says, generally Tiroler sex movies.

Law-abiding? The Dutch Transmission Authority has to do many inspections in the east of the country, since there are the most radio pirates

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.

I think some countries had advertising on the "national" TV channel - so were more "commercial" than the BBC and, say, SVT or NRK?

It is also worth remembering that the UK was quite a lot more advanced in TV than most other European countries. We launched our 405 line service in 1936 (which only got switched off in 1985), and it re-started post-war in 1946. So by the time ITV launched in 1955, some countries were still only just getting started with their first services - so may not have had a market to justify commercial broadcasting.

By "commercial television" you'd usually mean a private station funded mostly by advertising, and not a public-funded one with some advertising income. In that sense, the UK was one of three European countries to allow private commercial television in the 50s. AIUI, Luxembourg's CLT was private from the start, and the third country was Finland, oddly enough.

Italy opened up their airwaves in the 70s, but most other countries wouldn't allow private television until well into the 80s and 90s.

As for advertising on public stations, it started at a modest scale in some countries during the 50s. By the end of the 60s, public/state broadcasters in most of western Europe had advertising, notably excluding the UK and the Nordic countries.

Apparently, Europe's first fully commercial television station was the short-lived Telesaar, which signed on in 1953.

As I mentioned in another thread, the station was based in the French protectorate of the Saar before the protectorate joined West Germany in 1957 (as "Saarland") after a referendum.

Here's a fantastic site devoted to the history of the station (in German):

http://www.saar-nostalgie.de/Telesaar.htm

And here's the site in English via Google Translate:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.saar-nostalgie.de/Telesaar.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dtelesaar%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1600%26bih%3D775&sa=X&ei=ypc6UbOOJ6muyQH7xICYAQ&ved=0CEcQ7gEwAw

http://www.saar-nostalgie.de/Bilder/SR/Telesaar1.jpg

http://www.saar-nostalgie.de/Bilder/SR/Fernsehprogramm1c.JPG
Source: saar-nostalgie.de

Telesaar was eventually shut down after the protectorate joined West Germany. However, a French-language commercial radio station based in the Saar, Europe1, survived the handover, ended up playing a major role on the French radio landscape, and still operates today. (Later plans for a TV version of Europe 1, on the other hand, were never realized.)

Two other small European countries -- Luxembourg and Monaco -- also had fully commercial television from the start (the mid-1950s): RTL and Télé Monte Carlo, respectively. They both targeted viewers in neighboring countries.

Here's Télé Monte Carlo's famous ident from the '70s (the broadcaster had separate services for France and Italy):

Oh, I know. I meant "law-abiding" in the sense that a legally licensed broadcaster would have been unlikely to pirate British TV programming.

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.

The French are an interesting bunch, they used to have the ORTF back until the mid 1970s which I gather was like the BBC, but aswell as state funding it also had commercial income. The ORTF got broke up into seven organisations in the 70s with the three main channels becoming TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3, although they were still part of the same ilk they were also competing against each other at the same time, rumour being that at least one channel would be up for privatisation at some point, FR3 looking the most likeliest but by the mid 80s it was TF1 that got sold off. True commercial television in France didn't arrive until the mid 80s with Canal+ and La Cinq, but the least said about the latter the better.

You get the feeling that a lot of countries allowed advertisements on the state broadcasters back in the day, but its more common now not to have them, TVE and France Télévisions are two have axed them in recent times.

There was comparatively little resistance to putting ads on public television back in the day. Conservatives favoured TV advertising generally, and even some socialists could support it. In their mind, not only did it mean more income to the public broadcasters, it would also undermine funding for competing broadcasters and in some cases stop the flow of advertising money to other countries.

It was a much shorter leap than to allow full-on private television and the cultural depravity that would ensue.

Its not unlikely that we would have seen advertising in some form of the BBC as well, had it not been for ITV who were obviously very much against it.

I still don't understand why other countries never followed the same route as the UK with ITV. Have local private companies running a big company with rules and clauses

A few European countries have abolished advertising on public TV, but most countries have kept it. Particularly in small countries, the license fee alone would be insufficient to fund public broadcasting. (Yes, the Nordic countries have commercial-free public TV despite being small, but their license fees are unusually high.)



Speaking of the breakup of ORTF and the birth of TF1, Antenne 2, and FR3, here's an interesting compilation of various French TV idents and intros from the '70s, '80s, and early '90s:



Here's ORTF's evening news from 1974 announcing the breakup of ORTF -- and looking back at the broadcaster's history:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp1oHHaNEk8

And from the early '70s, here's an ident for the ORTF's second network:



If you'd like to read more about the breakup of ORTF, which is a fascinating topic, you my want to check out these books in your library:

The Media in France by Raymond Kuhn (Routledge, 1995)

Broadcasting and Democracy in France by Ruth Thomas (Bradford University Press, 1976, or Temple University Press, 1977)

For a description of French TV in the ORTF era, check out:

The Universal Eye: World Television in the Seventies by Timothy Green (Bodley Head, 1972)



Ruth Thomas mentions that this was proposed in France in the early 1970s, but that the government chose to retain its monopoly for political reasons. The situation was similar in other countries at the time.

When commercial TV did arrive in most European countries, it was already in the era of technology-driven deregulation (with widespread cable and satellie TV on the horizon), so most countries opted for multiple market-driven, loosely regulated commercial broadcasters rather than having a highly regulated commercial monopoly on the ITV model. The times had changed.

I'd say most were simply to late in the game. By the time they got around to launching private television, satellite television was already around the corner. In most countries, it would have been an unfair disadvantage for fledgling regional private stations to have to compete with several strong state-owned national channels that owned most of the advertising market. Even many of the new national networks struggled with years of losses, they were no license to print money.

There were some European countries with a more regional approach. Both Denmark and Norway licensed networks of regional stations in the late 80s and early 90s. They obviously never enjoyed the same success as ITV as they had to compete with both national channels and cable/satellite, to who they had a significant regulatory disadvantage.

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.