TV channels French Guiana

French Guiana's television serves a vast territory on the shoulder of South America - mostly rainforest, with its population gathered on the coast around Cayenne. As an overseas department of France, it receives the full French public broadcasting system alongside a small set of home-grown channels.

From the ORTF to Guyane La Première

Television arrived on 15 January 1967, when the ORTF station in Cayenne began broadcasting a few minutes of black-and-white programming each evening. The station passed through the familiar sequence of French overseas broadcasting - FR3-Guyane in 1975, RFO Guyane in 1982, Télé Guyane in 1999 - before becoming Guyane 1re when digital terrestrial television launched on 30 November 2010, and Guyane La Première in 2018. A direct satellite link with Paris improved reception from 1975, colour followed in the early 1980s, and the arrival of the digital network brought the metropolitan public channels to local screens and pushed the station to raise its share of home production. Its evening regional news has long been the territory's daily rendezvous, and its remit is local production - politics, culture, sport and the life of the communes - alongside programmes shared with the other overseas stations. Reaching the interior took decades: the town of Maripasoula saw television for the first time in June 1998, and the digital network now runs on nineteen transmitters along the coast and up the rivers.

The local channel

Tele Peyi - whose name carries the Creole word for "home country" - is the territory's own local channel, covering the life of the department: Cayenne's daily news, the communes of the coast, and the communities of the interior. Launched in September 2025, it grew out of Radio Peyi Guyane, the generalist station then marking ten years on the air, extending that voice onto the screen.

It shares the local field with KTV, an associative channel born in Kourou in 2013, and follows earlier attempts such as Antenne Créole Guyane, which broadcast from 1994 to 2010. Along the border rivers, Brazilian channels - above all Globo - are widely watched by satellite.

From the Ariane rocket launches at Kourou to the carnivals of Cayenne, local television keeps the territory watching itself.