Interesting take. I was looking at them more in terms of the intended audience of the content that they broadcast (mainstream, specialist) and ownership structure (private, commercial).
TF1, BBC One, and TV2 Denmark do get similar ratings relative to their respective competitors though.
FWIW, I may be wrong but if BBC One and ITV1 are competitors to each other as they're intended to be mainstream channels, BBC Two and Channel 4 seem to be competitors to each other in that they have more specialist content. Further, I believe ITV1 came before BBC Two.
Yes - ITV came before BBC Two (it launched 405 not 625, though it was Band III not Band I so you needed a new aerial and/or TV or bolt-on adaptor in many cases to receive it), but if you are looking at the Danish context, it's difficult to map the channels. DR2 is still really new, and TV2 is much closer to a BBC or C4 channel than ITV as it's government-owned and much more public service than ITV?
I think the reality is that it's really difficult to try and map other countries' channels to a UK context, as they don't exist in a UK context. In Sweden, for instance, there were no domestic commercial TV channels for many, many years (TV3 was beamed in from the UK to get round the Swedish commercial TV rules), and TV4 (which you can kind of equate to ITV in being the main commercial network in Sweden, didn't exist until 30+ years after ITV started in the UK)
Plus the heritage of channels is different, and many countries, like the UK, Sweden, France, Norway, Denmark etc. launched TV services with just a single channel doing all content. Two of the three Scandinavian countries (Sweden is an exception) for many years only had one channel broadcast by their main public service broadcaster, with secondary and tertiary channels only launching once multichannel satellite and then digital TV was launched (DR2 & NRK2 only launched in 1996 for instance) and have far less unque identities and heritage than BBC Two for instance, which launched 30 years earlier.
SVT2 started in a very different way to BBC Two (for years the then 'TV2' in Sweden was encouraged to compete with the original SVT 'Kanal 1' service, and they were editorially independent of each other within Sveriges Radio/Television, and TV2 (these days branded SVT2) - was more popular than the first channel, and was able to carry regional content (Kanal 1 was VHF, TV2 - like BBC Two - was UHF and thus more regionalised). It wasn't until TV4 launched in Sweden in the 90s that SVT2 stopped being the most popular channel in Sweden, and the two channels were revamped and became much more integrated with each other.
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