Following the confirmation at the end of October that it was likely to take a majority stake in production company Newen, French commercial broadcaster TF1 and FLCP, the holding company of the Newen group, have signed an agreement under which TF1 will acquire a 70 per cent equity interest in FLCP, with the existing shareholders […]
3D cinema technology specialist RealD is being bought by private equity company Rizvi Traverse Management for $551 million (€513m). The transaction has been approved by the RealD board and upon completion the business will become a privately-held firm. RealD’s 3D projection technology is in some 27,000 screens globally. RealD chairman and CEO Michael Lewis said […]
Kuwait Projects Company (KIPCO) issued a statement on November 8th to deny local reports that it had sold its stake in pay-TV operator OSN to the Qatar Investment Authority. The statement appeared on the Kuwait Stock Exchange. However, while the reports may be rumour only it is well-known that KIPCO has been searching for a […]
Following the October 16th announcement that online and mobile commerce giant Alibaba Group had made a non-binding proposal to the board of directors of multi-screen entertainment and media company Youku Tudou to acquire all shares that it did not already own, the pair have confirmed their entry into a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which […]
US computer game company Activision Blizzard, which produces World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, is buying King Digital Entertainment, the creator of Candy Crush Saga, in a deal worth $5.9 billion (€5.4 billion). Activision said the acquisition would make it a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms. It added […]
Media heavyweights and private investors including Discovery Communications, BT and a consortium led by its former chairman Luke Johnson are weighing up an offer for Channel 4 as the UK government prepares to sell off the broadcaster, according to The Sunday Telegraph. Johnson, who chaired the taxpayer-owned broadcaster between 2004 and 2010 and now leads […]
Korean telco SK Telecom is to acquire the country’s largest cable MSO CJ HelloVision as it seeks to extend its involvement in the media platform business. SK Telecom will take over a 30 per cent stake for 500 billion won (€400m) in CJ HelloVision from its parent firm CJ O Shopping, with plans to buy […]
Telestream, a provider of video transcoding and workflow automation solutions, has announced the acquisition of Cloud-based encoding provider, PandaStream. The result of a comprehensive investigation of key suppliers in the cloud-based encoding market, the acquisition accelerates Telestream’s strategy for providing cloud services to complement its on-premise solutions. As a direct result of this acquisition, Telestream […]
Gilles Pélisson, 58, will succeed TF1 Chairman and CEO Nonce Paolini and take up office on February 19th, one day after TF1 releases its 2015 results. Pélisson is the former CEO of Euro Disney and French hotel group Accor. Pélisson has been an administrator at TF1 since 2009 and knows the Bouygues Group from the […]
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally cleared dominant telco BT’s anticipated £12.5 billion (€15.8bn) acquisition of mobile operator EE. The CMA inquiry group had been looking at how the tie-up would affect competition in a number of different areas of the telecoms sector. As well as looking at how the merger might […]