ABSTRACT
The importance of developing the new media of cable and satellite as part of France’s hitech communications revolution featured prominently on the media policy agenda of both Socialist and Gaullist governments throughout the 1980s. However, the era of multichannel cable television has been slow to arrive. By the late 1990s only about 10 per cent of French households were hooked up to a cable network. Satellite television had fared even less well, with only a handful of households equipped to receive the output of the technologically oversophisticated French direct-broadcasting satellites Télédiffusion 1 and 2. However, in the late 1990s the development of digital television looked set to give a boost to satellite television in France.
