Minitel was great for it's time, but its huge success in France resulted in the country later being slower than other European countries to adopt the WWW.
First mover isn't always an advantageous position to be in.
Interestingly, this one went back and forth, AIUI. The initial British (monochrome) standards, which was very early, was quite flawed; later US standards improved on that, then NTSC improved on those, then PAL and SECAM improved on that (and bounced off each other a bit; the version of PAL that was eventually released used concepts from SECAM).
France, being France, did its own thing on the colour transition; SECAM wasn't used anywhere else in Western Europe (SECAM was better than both PAL and NTSC for the end user, but was hard to work with and not commonly used).
British and Irish TV channels, incidentally, continued to broadcast the pre-PAL standard on separate frequencies until surprisingly late. I believe the Irish broadcaster only stopped in the _90s_, when their conversion equipment became unreliable.
(The "Never The Same Colour" retronym also suggests it was colour-related.)
Old black & white 819 lines was the more highly defined television system before HDTV.
I had proper 100Mbits/s fiber in Paris 10 years ago and I still can't get that in my part of London.