The image rendering was an improvement upon Baird's thanks to the development of the "moving light point" system and the use of a camera with Weiller mirror drums by the engineer René Barthélemy, head of the radio laboratory of the Compagnie desmètres (CdC) of Montrouge.

Convinced by this demonstration and of the interest of this invention for the future, but also very aware that the ministerial instability must lead him to quickly imprint his mark on the heavy administration of the PTT for which he was responsible by modernizing, Georges Mandel decided to inaugurate as soon as possible a regular and experimental public television service in France.

The amphitheater of the PTT superior school, located in the premises of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications at 103 rue de Grenelle, was converted into a television studio on 17 April 1935 and its bleachers were dismantled to enlarge it.

One thousand guests of the Minister, personalities, journalists and industrialists flocked to the studio at 103 rue de Grenelle on Friday, 26 April 1935 to attend the first official regular French television broadcast transmitted by radio with a definition of 60 lines3.

At 8:15 pm, on the small greenish screen appeared the face of the actress and friend of the minister, Béatrice Bretty, member of the Comédie-Française, with at her side, Jean Toscane, the most famous voice of Radio PTT, and René Barthélemy.

Lips and eyes made up in black for the needs of television broadcasting, Miss Bretty recounted of her last tour in Italy with the troupe: "We had a great trip...".

Two months late, the official inauguration of 180-line television took place on Sunday, 8 December 1935, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm in front of the press, at the Radiovision-PTT studio at 103, rue de Grenelle in Paris, with a gala session combining excerpts from plays, comic operas, poems, songs and sketches performed by many famous comedians and music-hall artists invited by Béatrice Bretty, and whose numbers were announced at the screen by Suzy Wincker, the first official continuity announcer, on the air since June.

The very large public crowds in front of the receivers installed at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers at 292 rue Saint-Martin, at the National Tourist Office of the Champs-Elysées, at the Salon de la France d'Outre-Mer at the Grand Palais, at the Maison de la Chimie, and at the town hall of the 5th arrondissement of Paris, which simultaneously broadcast the images in 180 lines.

The Deputy Secretary General for Broadcasts, Wladimir Porché, brought the greatest French artists, such as Sacha Guitry, Serge Lifar and Maurice Chevalier, to the cameras of the Radiovision-PTT studio.

The PTT administration chose the 455-line high-definition equipment manufactured by Thomson for public demonstrations at the 1937 Paris International Arts and Techniques Exhibition, which was then transferred to the Radiovision-PTT studio for testing.

While the BBC Television Service was able to broadcast the arrival of the President of the French Republic Albert Lebrun in London for his official visit on 21 March 1939, RN Télévision was otherwise unable to film a single image.

The Minister of the PTT Alfred Jules-Julien [fr] thus promised on 31 March a bus equipped for remote reporting in the open air within two weeks, a new television studio and programs broadcast in the evening after dinner.

The administrative system of public broadcasting was modified by a decree of 29 July 1939 signed by the President of the Council Édouard Daladier, making French Broadcasting, and therefore the television service attached to it, a State monopoly which ceased to depend on the Ministry of PTT to pass under the administration of the National French Radio, newly created for this purpose, endowed with an autonomous budget and placed directly under the authority of the President of the council.

When France entered World War II on 3 September 1939, military authorities ordered the cessation of broadcasts and took control of the Eiffel Tower transmitter.

Opposed to this dismantling, Kurt Hinzmann [de], German television pioneer and former director of the programs of Berlin's Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow television station, who succeeded in convincing the German authorities to continue the broadcast of the programs of the station during the war by proposing its use to entertain and distract the war wounded in hospitals, took up this idea to apply it to the French capital and thus save the Parisian transmitter.

He recommended putting the Eiffel Tower transmitter back into service to broadcast a television channel intended to entertain the German soldiers hospitalized in the Kriegslazarette in Paris.

By order of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to the Ministry of PTT on 20 May 1942, the work to restore the transmitter in the Eiffel Tower to service was entrusted to the Compagnie des comptes de Montrouge and the German firm Telefunken, following a collaboration agreement between the two companies to jointly build the technical infrastructure of this new television channel.

The equipment of the Compagnie des Compteurs being considered uninteresting, Telefunken supplied the new television transmitter to the German standard of 441 lines, recovered from the Reichspost in Germany, and which was installed by technicians from Berlin.

Fernsehsender Paris (Paris-Télévision) moved into a large 3,000-seat ballroom, a remnant of the former Magic-City amusement park closed in 1926, unused since the start of the war.

This installation made it possible to start the programs on a regular basis on 7 May 1943 only in telecine, because the work on the V-shaped stage, allowing the cameras to be moved back for wider shots, had not been completed.

The Germans left the studios, leaving the French with a fully operational and among the most efficient television station in the world, which enabled French television to be the first in Europe to resume its broadcasts from the old studio and with the equipment from Fernsehsender Paris, from 1 October 1944 intermittently and in closed circuit test transmissions, because the Americans had administered the Eiffel Tower at the time and prohibited the use of its transmitter until 1 October 1945.

Following the return of the Eiffel Tower to the French precisely one year (1 October 1945) after the restart, the official resumption of television broadcasts took place with one hour of programming each day.

TF1, which originally stood for Télévision française 1 (French Television 1), was created on 1 January 1975 when law 74-696 of 7 August 1974, splitting the ORTF into seven separate organisations, came into effect.

On 16 April 2009, the employee responsible for the "Web innovation" department was fired for criticizing the HADOPI law in a private email (on 19 February) sent to a Member of Parliament.

[19][20][21] In 2004, Patrick Le Lay, CEO of TF1 made the following statement about the channel's aims: There are many ways to speak about TV, but in a business perspective, let's be realistic: at the basis, TF1's job is helping Coca-Cola, for example, to sell its product.

In addition, it is occasionally alleged that news reports from TF1 tend to ignore issues yielding a bad light on their parent group (Bouygues), while stressing the problems of competitors (such as Vinci SA).

However, TF1 now competes in this category with M6, which was initially a generalist channel focusing on musical programmes, but now has programming more resembling TF1 (notably, reality shows that TF1 started running just after M6 introduced them).