The Spanish government is considering calling a fresh public tender to award the nine DTT licences that were recently revoked following the Supreme Court ruling that the licences were invalid as they were granted by the the previous Administration without a public tender. In the new public tender, the Administration would give priority to those bidders interested in launching HD [...]
Pay-TV business in Spain is not going well. In the first quarter of the year the pay-TV market lost 98,000 subscribers as a whole with the financial crisis, higher taxes and less money in consumers’ hands being the main reasons behind the sharp fall. The leading pay-TV operator Canal Plus lost 28,000 subs to 1.69 million, the lowest subscription level [...]
Rapid conversion means that the number of digital homes in Eastern Europe will nearly double between 2012 and 2018, bringing the total to 121 million, according to a report from Digital TV Research. The Digital TV Eastern Europe report estimates that 13 million digital TV homes will be added in 2013 alone. Digital TV penetration crossed the halfway mark of [...]
Zambia’s government has awarded its digital TV migration contract, worth $220 million, to China’s Star Software Technology Company, part of the StarTimes broadcasting giant. StarTimes chairperson Pang Xing Sing described the awarding of the tender as one that was setting the pace to accelerate Zambia’s terrestrial digital migration by the stipulated deadline of 2015. The announcement was made in Lusaka [...]
Digital UK has published a consultation on proposals for allocating channel numbers to HD services in the Freeview electronic programme guide. The consultation anticipates future growth of HD channels on Freeview and includes proposed updates to Digital UK’s channel number policy. The proposals within this consultation will not necessitate changes to current channel numbers. Digital UK is keen to receive [...]
In a similar move to the UK, Italian legislators have determined that the nation’s mobile operators should bear the cost of installing filters to help mitigate potential interference to terrestrial digital TV reception from 4G mobile phone services operating in the 800MHz band. The Italian Council of State has approved draft proposals setting out how the operators have to solve [...]
Following the admission by John Whittingdale, Chairman of the UK House of Commons Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, that a Communications Bill was unlikely to feature in the government’s legislative programme for 2013-14, Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has revealed that a Communications Green Paper – a tentative government report and consultation [...]
The Digital TV Group (DTG), the industry association for digital TV in the UK, has published the first status update of the government-backed Future of Innovation in Television Technology (FITT) Taskforce. Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey MP announced the publication of the update in his keynote speech to delegates at the DTG’s annual Summit: “It’s very [...]
UTECA, the private TV Association formed by Mediaset, Atresmedia, Veo and Net TV, is taking the Spanish government to court over its decision to revoke nine DTT channels on the grounds that it puts the Audiovisual sector “in an unprecedented situation with no legal guarantee”. Last March, the Administration decided to revoke the licences of nine nationwide DTT channels awarded [...]
South Africa’s communications minister Dina Pule is complaining about the time being taken to get digital TV off the ground, and conditional access installed, in the country. “I am concerned about the slow progress of finalising the conditional access (matter)‚” Pule said at a workshop hosted by the National Association of Manufacturers in Electronic Components‚ which represents electronic manufacturers. “The [...]
