A headline rate, the commitment behind it, and two different catalogues

The full euro grid, screen by screen

Trimix organises plans by number of simultaneous screens and by term. Reduced to a monthly rate, the structure becomes legible:

• One screen, 6 months: €34.99 — about €5.83 a month
• One screen, 12 months: €49.99 — about €4.17 a month
• One screen, 24 months: €89.99 — about €3.75 a month, the advertised rate
• Two screens, 12 months: €89.99 — about €7.50 a month
• Three screens, 6 months: €69.99 — about €11.67 a month
• Three screens, 12 months: €139.99 — about €11.67 a month
• Three screens, 24 months: €249.99 — about €10.42 a month

Where the discount is real and where it is a bet

Two things stand out in that grid. The first is that the second and third screens are expensive in a way the headline conceals: an annual single screen is €49.99 and an annual three-screen plan is €139.99, so the two additional streams add €90 — almost three times the cost of the first one. Households comparing the €4 figure to a family plan elsewhere are not comparing like with like.

The second is that the three-screen six-month and twelve-month plans work out at exactly the same monthly rate, €11.67. The twelve-month plan offers no discount whatsoever for doubling the commitment. That is worth knowing, because it means the longer term buys you nothing except a longer period during which you cannot leave. We found the same pattern inside our own price list and wrote it up in the pricing analysis — it is not unique to Trimix, but it is unusually stark here.

Where a real discount does exist is the 24-month single-screen plan, which drops the rate by about 10 per cent against twelve months. Whether 10 per cent is worth prepaying a second year to an unregulated seller is a judgement, and ours is that it is not. Two years is long enough for an operator to change hands, lose upstream supply, or stop trading, and there is no mechanism to recover a prepayment if any of that happens.

Two catalogues on one homepage

Reading the site closely turns up something we did not expect. The hero section advertises more than 162,000 films and 26,000 series. The plan cards, further down the same page, state 120,000 films and series. Those are not the same claim, and both are live on the same site.

We are not going to guess which one is intended, because the interesting part is not the discrepancy itself but what it demonstrates. These figures are not counted from an inventory that could be queried; if they were, two places on one page could not disagree. They are marketing inputs, written at different times by different hands, and nobody reconciled them because nothing depends on them being right.

That is consistent with what we found across the whole set. Two unrelated providers advertise exactly 61,000 channels. Another uses a trademarked feature name character-for-character identical to one on our own site. Claims range from 20,000 to 61,000 channels and 40,000 to 200,000 titles with no audited list published by anyone, anywhere.

The practical instruction is short. Ignore the catalogue figures entirely, on every site including ours, and decide on the things that can be checked: the price of the exact term and screen count you need, the payment method, and how the service behaves on a busy evening. Our provider checklist covers those in order.

The advantage a French buyer should actually weigh

Trimix prices in euros with no currency selector, and for a buyer in France that is a genuine, quantifiable benefit rather than a branding cue.

When you pay a dollar-priced service from a euro account, two costs appear. The conversion happens at whatever rate applies that day, which you do not control, and most cards add a foreign-transaction fee on top — commonly around 3 per cent, though it varies by issuer and is worth checking on your own card. Neither is large on a €50 purchase, but both are real and neither is advertised.

A euro price also means the figure you agreed to is the figure on your statement, which makes a dispute simpler if you ever need one. That is a small but genuine point in Trimix's favour that has nothing to do with channel lineups, and it is the kind of thing a French-language storefront is actually good evidence of — unlike claims about French channel coverage, which no sales page can substantiate.

Our France guide sets out what to verify on a French connection, including the channels most likely to be missing and how to check the programme guide is accurate rather than decorative.

Which Trimix plan makes sense, and which do not

For a French buyer wanting one screen and willing to commit for a year, Trimix at €49.99 is a reasonable, straightforwardly priced option, and paying in euros saves you a conversion and a card fee. That is a real advantage we cannot match.

Two things we would avoid. The 24-month plan, where a roughly 10 per cent saving does not justify prepaying two years to any seller in this category. And the three-screen tiers, which are priced steeply enough that a family should compare them carefully against alternatives before committing — its own six and twelve month three-screen plans cost the same per month, so there is no reason to choose the longer one.

Smartiflix's case for a French household rests on flexibility rather than price: a one-month entry at $14 that lets you test before committing anything substantial, published prices for two, three and four simultaneous connections, and a named-domain list to check a checkout page against. Set against that, you are paying a conversion fee for the ability to find out cheaply. Which trade is better depends on how confident you already are, and the full grid lets you do that arithmetic yourself.