Smart home services pioneer Plume has closed a new financing round of $85 million (€78.2m). This includes $60 million in Series D preferred equity and $25 million in debt financing, bringing Plume’s total funding to $127 million. The new investor syndicate, including Charter Communications, Qualcomm, Belkin, and Service Electric Cablevision, took approximately 75 per cent […]
A poll carried out for UK newspaper the Sunday Express has revealed that 61 per cent of respondents want the BBC licence fee abolished. It also found people believe the BBC does not provide value for money and are increasingly switching to rivals. While 63 per cent agree the BBC is “an important part of […]
Elon Musk is looking to raise $250 million for his SpaceX rocket launching system, according to a CNBC report. Given that SpaceX currently has Musk’s mega-constellation Starlink system in its portfolio of assets (which also includes the Crew Dragon shuttle and Starship long-distance rocket) means that SpaceX has a value of some $36 billion, says […]
Eminent academic Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School, and a renowned commentator on media and broadcasting, has suggested that moves to replace the BBC licence fee with a form of subscription would result in “a car crash”. Barwise made his comment in a panel discussion on ‘The Future of […]
The US Federal Communications Commission’s Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) has released updated data which it suggests shows that the digital divide substantially narrowed during the first two years of Chairman Ajit Pai’s leadership of the FCC. Specifically, from December 2016 to December 2018, the number of Americans without any options for at least […]
African pay-TV giant MultiChoice is creating an Innovation Fund with the intention of investing in small businesses within the video entertainment and technology areas. MultiChoice says that this fund is a further development of its existing Enterprise Development Trust (EDT) and will “address the gender gap and youth unemployment, as well as ensuring increased and […]
Rural areas in the UK will benefit from a series of government-funded trials to help them seize the potential of modern technology, the Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden has announced. Nine projects across the country will receive a share of £35 million (€41.9m) from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s rural and industrial 5G […]
“Democracy is the worst way to run a country, except all the others,’” said Winston Churchill. The same may well be true of a licence fee and a PSB national broadcaster. But that doesn’t stop every new Tory government concerning itself with scrapping it, no matter how many much more urgent things they have to […]
The UK Government has opened a public consultation on whether it should proceed with the decriminalisation of TV licence evasion by replacing the criminal sanction with an alternative civil enforcement scheme. The Government believes that it is right to look again at decriminalising TV licence evasion in order to ensure a proportionate and fair approach […]
A spin-off business from France’s national space agency (CNES) has raised €100 million in funding in order to launch a constellation of 25 ‘nano-satellites’ to serve the growing Internet of Things market. Kinéis was created last July with the support of CNES and CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites) and it aims to become a major player […]