ABSTRACT
Expansion in the provision of terrestrial television in the 1980s was accompanied by developments in the new media of cable and satellite. While the potential industrial and economic benefits to be gained from the communications revolution drove much of policy making in this sector, the decisions taken clearly had important implications for broadcasting. At the heart of the analysis in this chapter lie two major paradoxes. The first is that despite large-scale state investment, neither of these new media has so far been successful in becoming a major supplier of programmes to the television audience in France. Few French viewers receive programmes from cable or direct satellite transmission, with the result that as yet both have spectacularly failed to pose a competitive challenge to the market dominance of terrestrial television.
