French & German TV ?

adsk

Satellite is the best way to get French/German TV.

A 60cm dish pointed at 19.2E Astra satellite will get you both. You will need a TNTSAT approved box and card (available for £80 on Ebay/Amazon). The viewing card is valid for 4 years from activation.
The card will only work in a TNTSAT box so you are restricted in your choice of receivers.

The TNTSAT box is capable of receiving the German channels also. By default when you buy your TNTSAT box it will only scan for French channels on setup but you can choose to scan for non-TNTSAT channels.

If you were to be a heavy viewer you might want to consider buying a 2nd STB for the German channels.

If you really don't want to go down the satellite route then online streaming is an alternative. You'd need an android box or similar.
If you want to watch ARD most channels stream online for free but some programmes esp Sport are blocked from non-German IP addresses. ZDF has a more limited streaming offer. Generally the private channels SAT1/RTL family don't have a free online streaming service for overseas viewers. Similarly, there is a very restricted offer of French streaming channels.

sasparillo

Hey, thanks everybody! This thread has been enormously informative!

Anthorn

Check the apps available on your smart tv to see if IPTV is available. It's certainly available on Fire TV Stick because I have it. So that may be an option. The problem I have with IPTV is that I haven't actually managed to work out how to use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTV