French TV

This trailer for France 3, promoting them as an equal opportunity employer has been banned for being sexist.

La majorité de nos présentateurs sont des présentatrices !https://t.co/iXTEwFNWlh

— France 3 (@France3tv) October 2, 2015

Wow. What were they thinking?!

Haha that is horribly bad. Wow.

At least it's sexist to both men and women.

The head of France Televisions weather and senior France 2 weather presenter Philippe Verdier has been put on a "forced holiday" after publishing a controversial book about climate change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11931645/Frances-top-weatherman-sparks-storm-over-book-questioning-climate-change.html

France is about to become the first country to perform an MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 switchover. The big switch is set for 5 April 2016. After that, all channels will be broadcast with DVB-T/MPEG-4, almost all of them in HD.

The number of multiplexes is being reduced from eight to six to clear the 700 MHz band. In total, they will have 29 HD channels, with each mux holding 4-5 HD channels. At the moment they only have three HD channels per mux, so they've clearly chosen compatibility over quality.

http://www.recevoirlatnt.fr/
http://www.universfreebox.com/article/31969/Nouvelle-composition-des-multiplex-et-nouvelle-recherche-des-chaines-pour-la-TNT

I'm also told that FR3 on D-Sat now seem to be using active stream switching from the national HD version to the regional SD streams for local news opt outs ? In exactly the same way BBC 1 and ITV don't !

Isn't that because the hardware used here doesn't support it?

I'm not sure, I suspect it would need to, but you'd hope things like the latest You View and Sky boxes should be 'future proofed' to enable such things now ?

France 3 still has a national version online (and on Zattoo Switzerland) which shows a 'best of' the regional news in that slot. Similar to UK Today, but with a voice over.

Probably helped by them not using DVB-T2 when they went HD, and having used H264 from the start on their DVB-T broadcasts for pay-TV and HD stuff, with MPEG2 only being used for SD free-to-air stuff. That said, they are likely to need to do a T to T2 (or better) transition at some point, but then - like Germany - they may use H265/HEVC instead of H264?

If the SD and HD PIDs are on the same transponder, then it should work in the UK I believe. Sweden has been doing this for years to allow for regional opts on SVT1 AND SVT2 on satellite - but only in SD.

They have regional SIDs for all the SVT1 and SVT2 regional variations. Most of the time they point to the PIDS for the Network SVT1 and SVT2 audio and video streams, but when they opt-out on SVT1 OR SVT2 the regional SVT1/2 SIDs are re-pointed to the regional audio and video stream PIDS. This means they can opt-out on either SVT or SVT2 - but not at the same time.

However they squeeze all of the streams onto a single transponder to avoid a re-tune. And there is still a nasty transition (a grey screen for a second or so on the receiver I saw)

They don't do it for HD broadcasts. (And don't have regional news on their DVB-T2 HD variants either, and broadcast Stockholm's regional news nationally on the HD versions)