Badger Électricité

Will my old TV work in France?

There is often confusion about whether a televison set bought & used in the UK will work once in France.

Historically the answer was a big fat non! Before the age of digital TV broadcasts all transmissions used an analogue signal but the video format of the broadcast could be different. You may have heard strings of letters bandied about - NTSC, SECAM, PAL.
The UK (& most of Europe apart from France) plumped for the Phase Alternating Line (PAL) format for colour TV broadcasts back in the early 1960s. France went for Sequential Couleur Avec Memoire (SECAM). Both formats use the same number of lines per frame (625), unlike the National Television System Committee (NTSC) standard which uses 525 lines, & is used on the American continent & many Asian countries.

So, a set made for PAL wouldn't "understand" a SECAM signal, & vice versa. However, many modern sets are built to work on both standards, as it saves the manufacturers the bother of making two types. Don't get rid of your UK set until you've checked the documentation that you have with the telly, or Google the "model + make + manual".

07/06/2009: By way of an update on this subject, it's worth noting that all analogue TV transmitters in France will be swtiched off by/on November 30th 20011 as digital TV has been introduced. There is a phased shut-down starting this year. In other words, worrying about the stuff above is getting a bit uneccessary, & you need to read what's below......

Moving onto digital broadcasts: In broad terms the UK Freeview service & the French TNT (Télévision Numérique Terrestre) are broadcast using the same standards (DVB-T with MPEG-2 compression) BUT the UK uses a 2k COFDM (Coded Orthogonal Frequncy-Division Multiplexing), whereas the French use an 8k one. If you have an older UK Freeview box that is only set up for COFDM 2k it won't work in France, but a newer one should have the ability to use 2k & 8k & will work on the French TNT system. The UK should be going over to the more robust 8k standard once the analogue broadcasts are stopped, hence why new boxes should be dual standard. French TNT boxes generally are, so they would work in the UK......

There's an in-depth explanation about COFDM on the DTG site here.  Thanks are due to Ben Davies for that one.

Once you have received a digital terrestrial signal the native format of the TV set is irrelevant (SECAM or PAL).

TVs that are new enough to have a built in Freeview tuner are probably capable of handling both analogue transmission formats anyway, as pointed out above (& be 2k/8k COFDM capable). The TNT service offers more channels than you can get on analogue but, obviously, they are the French ones. As with the UK, not all corners of France have TNT coverage yet, but it's easy to check. There's a TNT coverage map here. 

If you are after British TV then you will have to go for a satellite set-up &, again the TV type won't matter.

If you need assistance with setting up a TV system of any type please don't hesitate to get in touch.