French TV options in London

[mpstevensuk]

Looking for some advice on best French TV options in London.

At the moment I have a mystery dish on the house that hasn't been used in 5 years. It's probably whatever "normal" UK satellite is.

The place is rented but there's a good chance I'd get permission for a new dish if required.

I'm looking for a good selection of channels for someone learning French - so I think news and kids TV would be ideal. Films might be nice. If there's a choice of audio channels / subtitles that'd be amazing.

I don't currently have a TV, so something that feeds into an iMac would be ideal.

At the moment the BIS TV package looks good to me - is that reasonable?

[TotalSatTeam]

Originally Posted by mpstevensuk

Looking for some advice on best French TV options in London.

At the moment I have a mystery dish on the house that hasn't been used in 5 years. It's probably whatever "normal" UK satellite is.

The place is rented but there's a good chance I'd get permission for a new dish if required.

I'm looking for a good selection of channels for someone learning French - so I think news and kids TV would be ideal. Films might be nice. If there's a choice of audio channels / subtitles that'd be amazing.

I don't currently have a TV, so something that feeds into an iMac would be ideal.

At the moment the BIS TV package looks good to me - is that reasonable?

For French kids channels and cinema, you really don't have much choice other than Canal+/ CanalSat - however, these are more complicated to arrange and require valid French address in addition to a 12 months contract paid in advance at aroun £800 per year.

Now for the rest of us, the French national TV is great too, you get 20 channels for £398 as full package including installation, delivery and 12 months on site UK warranty.

If the MAC take video input then, it should work fine

[mpstevensuk]

The national TV package sounds like the best option to me then. I'll probably be back to buy in a few months once I save up my pennies

[thetrevone]

Hi mpstevensuk,
I have the TNTSAT package, I chose this to help with my French studies, primarily because of the availability of subtitles. A fair percentage of the TNTSAT channels have subtitles, it is also possible to get French subtitles on TV5 monde on the FTA channels on Astra (when transmitted). From my own experience I have found that news programs that contain subtitles live are next to useless as they are so far behind the spoken word. On other programs they are generally very good (with the exception of CH+ when free to air which is unwatchable with subtitles on). I also like news channels such as BFMTV which have a scroller at the bottom of the screen which is repeated quite often and allows the possibility of looking up words in the dictionary. It is well worth the investment and the TotalSat guys do a good job

[mpstevensuk]

Thanks thetrevone, that's exactly the sort of thing I wanted to know.

It does sound like one of the totalsat packages would work well for me.

I'll probably buy in a few months, my bank account's still recovering from christmas!

[thetrevone]

You are most welcome,
Let me know if I can help anymore, if you are not buying for a while, keep an eye on the offerings from TotalSat, as there is another system around which I believe they are evaluating, I believe it is very similar but I have no idea about the availability of subtitles

[TotalSatTeam]

Thanks for the feedback mate,

Originally Posted by thetrevone

You are most welcome,
Let me know if I can help anymore, if you are not buying for a while, keep an eye on the offerings from TotalSat, as there is another system around which I believe they are evaluating, I believe it is very similar but I have no idea about the availability of subtitles

True, it is called FranSat will cost almost the same price, will require a bigger dish size and will not have no Spanish or German channels on it.
Subtitles will work on Fransat

What it will not have is; Canal+ channels FTA slot, it will not be possible to add Canal+ in future (with the current, it will be possible -still a contract issue..)

Also for current TNTSAT, since it is an offering from CANAL and now France Telecom is competing with them head to head, we heard a rumour that CANAL might release a couple of it's channels on TNTSAT to give it an edge...

The Fransat will be online in few days, we have it in stock -tested and we happy with it.

Just a matter of sorting out the website pages and dedicated forum section. I say we have it live by Monday 22/02

Nab