TNTSAT, a digital terrestrial free-TV offer via the ASTRA satellite system, has just found its way into 750,000 domiciles across the beautiful French countryside. For those unaware, the service targets regions where TVs cannot receive signals from terrestrial transmitters, and it offers viewers the "full range of French digital terrestrial free-TV channels over the ASTRA satellites, allowing a 100% coverage of France." But that's not all that's being announced today: TNTSAT HD is being launched on February 15, 2009 alongside the launch of free DTT channels in high-def being available on ASTRA; those eager to get a jump on things can expect around ten more SD / HD TNTSAT receivers to become available before the year's end. And to think, we heard that France wasn't exactly rushing to adopt HD back in May -- guess there's nothing like a little kick in the pants to get things going.

Apparently all that's necessary to get a lagging country to hop on the high-def bandwagon is to talk bad about 'em, or at least that's the case here with France. After we heard that the nation wasn't exactly rushing out to adopt HD, in comes word that four major French channels will soon be available in high-definition on digital terrestrial TV (DTT). TF1 HD, France 2 HD, M6 HD and Arte HD will all begin broadcasting OTA in HD on October 30th, and while all of these are already available on other platforms, we can only imagine that beaming 'em out gratis will greatly increase HD awareness. Any other nations want to follow suit? Oh, and France, way to be a role model out there.

With enough bandwidth to support 1080p video on-demand, France's Numericable has apparently found space left over in its MPEG-4 DOCSIS 3.0 network to add five new channels. All due before the end of the month, Melody Zen and Brava HDTV jump into the Premium Plus channel lineup, while Euro 1080, i-Concerts HD and Ushuaïa TV HD head to the premium package. No MTV Networks?

Talk about a let down. According to a new report from Variety, Daniel Bilalian -- France Televisions' director of sports programming -- has announced that "HD transmissions would not be available for this summer's Olympic Games on any of the pubcaster's channels." The article also notes that French networks in general have been slow to move towards high-definition, with only Canal Plus putting forth a proposal for premium HD transmissions (from pay-TV providers). Still, it's noted that private networks TF1 and M6 have "committed to airing at least 80-percent of their content in HD by the end of 2012," but it's not like we're really down with twiddling our thumbs for four more years waiting for it to happen.

Although the Ultimate Fighting Championship made its HD PPV debut way back on UFC 67, Canadians not attending UFC 83 live at the Bell Centre in Montreal will have the option of viewing it in the comfort (and safety) of their own home in gorgeous high-definition. The event will be available via select Vu! pay-per-view channels, and if you're looking to catch it in French, you'll be able to do that also -- albeit in SD, sadly. Get set, the action kicks off with live pre-fight coverage at 4:00PM on April 18th.

While the likes of Comcast (among others) won't have DOCSIS 3.0 ready to roll out until sometime next year, France's Numericable is already dishing out the high-speed goodness. Reportedly, the French cable operator has stretched its all-fiber network to Angers, Martigues, Marseille, Lille and Metz over the past month or so, bringing the total homes touched by said network to over two million. For the lucky residents of the aforementioned cities, they are now able to receive blazing fast internet (up to 100Mbps), HDTV, VOD and lots more. If your locale wasn't mentioned, take heart, as the company is purportedly aiming to reach some 70 cities by mid-year.

Let It Wave's bandlet upconversion technology is on the air on a French high definition TV station broadcasting the French Roland Garros Tennis open. The CTO of France Televisions Interactive states the company is using the technology to mix upconverted SD sources with native HDTV footage, enabling high definition programming to reach customers sooner. We haven't had the best experiences with mixed SD content at US sporting events like the PGA Championship, but Let It Wave claims its technology upconverts as high as 1080p with no flickering or jaggies. French television is currently testing the technology on Altera FPGA-based hardware and will continue to do so for the next three months with a variety of sources, the company plans to announce more products at NAB 2007.

StudioCanal, not well known in the US but one of the largest distributors of movies in the world will be releasing films on HD DVD, and now we have confirmation from Microsoft's Amir M. that they will be encoded in VC-1 at 24p, theoretically removing any possible barrier for their being played on US HD DVD players. The main benefit of this of course being that StudioCanal holds the European release rights to many movies currently limited to Blu-ray only distributors like Fox here in the U.S. Unless region coding is adopted by HD DVD, it could be very simple for aficionados to obtain copies of their favorite movies simply by importing them, and perhaps put additional pressure on distributors here to go multiformat to avoid losing sales to importers.

We are not aware of any plans yet announced by StudioCanal to release movies on Blu-ray, and with their Vivendi Universal connection plus Blu-ray region coding that may not give US buyers access to Universal content anyway. Of course we have to wait until the titles are actually released and whether or not region coding for HD DVD is finalized, but this could provide a big boost to HD DVD supporters who don't want to be locked out of some of their favorite movies.

[Thanks for the tip Glenn!]

French ADSL provider Free has partnered with i-concerts to create a 24/7 high definition concert network, i-concerts HD. Beyond the IPTV channel, they also feature i-concerts Jukebox for VOD access, although it is not clear if that content will be HD or not. The network launched yesterday, and will feature content from all genres, including performers such as Beyoncé, Seal, Radiohead, James Brown, and Gorillaz. The IPTV rollout is happening much faster in Europe compared to the US, in fact the i-concert network is already available to Belgian subscribers over IPTV and in France direct to a PC.  As telephone companies expand IPTV offerings here, hopefully we'll see more options for high def programming like this become available.

Quick: Who has the third largest film library in the world?

Now if you didn't cheat and read the title then you may have been like me and never heard of StudioCanal until five minutes ago. If you have, the fact that this French distributor has just announced they are releasing 30 HD-DVD titles in the near future is no surprise because you're probably well aware they are the French arm of Vivendi Universal. French HDTV owners can look forward to titles like Million Dollar Baby, Traffic, or The Graduate as well as French flicks like La Haine and Brotherhood of the Wolf.

We've had some updates on Japan-only high definition releases but very little information about Europe. Maybe some of our European readers can tell us what kind of splash next generation DVDs are making over there, or not.

All of this is of little consequence to those of us in the U.S., the real question is when can we start importing foreign HD-DVDs and looking down on people who dislike subtitles?

[Via MovieWeb]

We'd insert some corny French welcome here, but we don't know any. Regardless of our language barrier, we now all know one thing clearly: HDTV. Rival platforms Canal Group and TPS are competing to get more high definition to their customers, quicker. While TPS has been airing part time high def since February, Canal has promised to launch one full time channel on April 4, followed in June by National Geographic HD.

Well, now we can check France of our banned travel countries list. I had so missed the Louvre.