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Comment by severino | Hacker News Reader

The article says "In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons" and later, he says that everything changed when a fourth channel (Canal Plus) was launched in 1984. However, TF1's privatization was made later, in 1987.

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And Japanese anime where first introduced by the Récré A2[1] program, created in 1978 and whose team moved to TF1 after the privatization where became the Club Dorothée[2] which is probably the program the author has in mind.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9cr%C3%A9_A2

[2]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Doroth%C3%A9e

Canal+ was the first private and pay-per-view channel, using the VHF bands empty after the shutdown (in 1983) of the 819 lines black and white signal of TF1.

This was my childhood in the 80's!

I don't remember TF1 being more boring than the other two, but Antenne 2 definitely had a block of Japanese cartoons in the afternoon. I'm pretty sure all three channels had state funding to some extent or another. They all ran commercials between programs. They would never interrupt a program with commercials. If you watched a movie, or even a TV program, you could expect to watch it all the way through without bathroom breaks. Popular contemporary American films were dubbed into French, but films that were considered more culturally significant (say, directed by John Ford or Akira Kurosawa) were shown in the original language and subtitled if necessary.

I was about twelve or thirteen when Canal+ came along. The content was scrambled so you couldn't really watch it without a subscription, but that's where the porn was, and you could tell what was happening on screen if you squinted right.

Then came La Cinq, the first completely private TV channel. Here, movies and TV programs were interrupted with commercial breaks. There was a lot of American programming and it was always dubbed, never subtitled. They played stuff like Knight Rider and Airwolf in the afternoon, so I put up with the commercial breaks which were still far shorter and less frequent than on American television.

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