Essentiel B, Continental Edison and Edenwood: what they ship with and what comes off

France is one of this site's six markets, and three of the best-selling televisions there carry the name of the shop that sells them: Essentiel B at Boulanger, Continental Edison at Cdiscount and Edenwood at Electro Dépôt. Almost nobody looks inside them, so we downloaded the European product register, the French company register and their own websites.

Start with the biggest correction: Edenwood is not Auchan's. Auchan's brand is Qilive. Searching auchan.fr for "edenwood tv" returns, word for word, "Aucun résultat pour : edenwood tv", and everything that does come back is a Qilive.

Who stands behind each one#

In EPREL, the European register where every energy label is filed, each television carries the name of the company that declares it. There is no ambiguity there at all.

The Essentiel B sets are declared by SOURCING & CREATION, at 1 Avenue de la Motte, 59810 Lesquin, which is Boulanger's head office. In the French company register it is SIREN 487716623, activity code 46.43Z (wholesale of household appliances) and one figure that says everything: its declared headcount band is one to two employees. The brand that fills Boulanger's television aisle fits in one office.

The Continental Edison sets are declared by CDISCOUNT, from 120-126 quai de Bacalan, Bordeaux. No deduction needed: the legal notice on continentaledison.fr says the site is "édité par Continental Edison, société anonyme […] immatriculée au Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés de Bordeaux sous le numéro 424 059 822", and that number is Cdiscount's SIREN. In the register, Cdiscount's registered trading names include "OCEANIC" and "CONTINEN[tal Edison]". The site puts it plainly: "Une marque adoptée par Cdiscount", and further down, "les produits, la livraison et le SAV sont garantis par Cdiscount".

The Edenwood sets are declared by ELECTRO DEPOT FRANCE SAS, SIREN 433744539, Route de Vendeville, 59155 Faches-Thumesnil. Its brand page is titled, simply, "Edenwood - Electro Dépôt".

And in all three, the EPREL registrantNature field reads MANUFACTURER. None declares a manufacturer other than itself, which is an elegant way of not saying who builds the thing. Continental Edison's own site describes the real mechanism in its section on how the products are designed: "on sélectionne nos partenaires industriels avec rigueur". Selecting industrial partners is not manufacturing.

One detail sums the operation up: continental-edison.fr, with the hyphen, is a blank OVH page reading "Site en construction". The brand lives at continentaledison.fr, no hyphen, and in Cdiscount's catalogue.

The proof is in the directory#

This site's directory records, for every television, the device the set reports: the platform it is built on. It comes from the official Google Play device list, not from a sales brochure. Across 2,437 televisions, 536 brands and 390 platforms, these three break down like this:

• Essentiel B: 2 entries, platforms R1 and R2. None exclusive. Shares hardware with 52 brands.
• Continental Edison: 10 entries, 10 platforms. None exclusive. Shares with 127 brands.
• Edenwood: 3 entries, bangbae, kenton and komagome. None exclusive. Shares with 49 brands.

R1 carries 46 brands, and 45 of the rows declare exactly the same model. These are literal:

Acer,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
EssentielB,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
Hitachi,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
JVC,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
Nokia,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
SCHNEIDER,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv
Thomson,ATV R1,Android TV,R1,tv

The Essentiel B does not resemble a Nokia or a Thomson: it is the same entry with a different badge. R2 repeats it across 48 brands.

Continental Edison goes further. On martin, its row carries the territory string EU、UK、AP, ideographic commas and all, character for character the same string Blaupunkt, JVC and Schneider carry on that same platform. On kenton and bangbae it crosses paths with Edenwood, that is, with a rival chain's brand.

And that is the fun part of the French shop brands: Listo, Boulanger's other brand, sits on tamachi and yeongdeungpo, both shared with Continental Edison and with Qilive, Auchan's brand. Boulanger selling a remote whose internal reference is "pour TV ESSB/LISTO" stops looking like a coincidence. Between them, the four chain brands share hardware with 148 different trade names.

What system each one declares#

Here you have to separate what the directory says from what is on the shop shelf today, because they do not agree.

In the directory, all three are Android TV, and they say so in the model name itself: EDENWOOD 4K Android TV, Continental Edison Android TV, and ATV R1 with the marketing column set to Android TV. Not one of their entries declares Google TV.

But the Essentiel B sets Boulanger sells today are not Android. There are four televisions of the brand in the catalogue, one LED and three QLED, and the 43QLED306 listing gives "Système d'exploitation" as "TV connectée Vidaa U". The 50QLED307, the same. VIDAA is Hisense's system. The two directory entries are earlier units.

For Continental Edison and Edenwood we could not confirm the system on the current models: cdiscount.com answers with a 5 KB anti-bot wall and no product page at all, and electrodepot.fr product pages return 404 when downloaded. On the Electro Dépôt grid the only system field is "TV connectée : SmartTV", which says nothing.

How many years of updates they promise#

This is the real difference from a Sony, and the answer is in EPREL, in the minimum software update availability field. The figures below come from records we actually downloaded:

• Essentiel B: 10 records declared, 10 downloaded, 7 of them televisions. Three of the seven have the field blank; the other four declare 7 years.
• Continental Edison: 141 declared, 141 downloaded, 138 televisions. 29 blank. The rest run from 1 to 11 years, and the commonest value, on 41 records, is 2 years.
• Edenwood: 133 declared, of which pagination only let us pull 110, all televisions. 19 blank, 71 at 8 years, 13 at 2. We are not extrapolating to the 23 we did not get.

It is the same gap we documented on Nokia and Thomson. A blank field is not a legal zero, but it is not a commitment either: it is a box nobody filled in, in the one place where the promise would be enforceable.

How to find out what you actually have#

The badge on the front is no use here. What works is asking the set. With ADB connected:

adb shell getprop ro.product.device

That returns martin, bangbae, R1 or whatever it is, and that code is what really determines which packages ship and what can come off. A platform's package list applies to every brand that shares it. If your Continental Edison says martin, whatever holds for a Blaupunkt or a JVC on martin holds for you.

For the system, adb shell getprop ro.build.version.release, and to tell the interfaces apart: com.google.android.leanbacklauncher is Android TV; com.google.android.tvlauncher is Google TV.

What comes off#

If the set is Android or Google TV, the usual rules. Off go the streaming apps you do not use and the free-content channels that clutter the home screen. Carefully, the recommendation engine, com.google.android.tvrecommendations: it leaves the screen clean but empties the "continue watching" row. Leave Google Play services, com.google.android.gms, alone, and the launcher too until you have another one working.

If it is an Essentiel B on VIDAA, there is no ADB and no package to disable. What applies is that system's own clean-up, starting with the privacy settings.

The step by step is in the guide to own-brand televisions, and the full map of who shares a platform with whom is in the piece on JVC, Blaupunkt and Hyundai.

If you own one#

What we are missing is what the shops do not publish: what your television says in ro.product.device and which Android version it declares. With a few answers we can say which platform each current series runs on, which today none of the three chains makes clear.