The Spanish government is planning to lift the TV ad ban on RTVE allowing the state-owned group to be financed by a mix of TV ad revenues and state subsidies, as it was before 2009 when new legislation that prohibited it from broadcasting ads was approved. The decision is subject to the forthcoming ruling from the EU Court over the [...]
Spain will remain one of the few European countries without an independent regulatory body that oversees the broadcast industry. The Government has finally ruled out the creation of a specific Audiovisual watchdog for lack of money thereby breaking its promise to set up the State Media Council (CEMA) approved in 2010 with an estimated cost of €7 million. With the [...]
Following tests conducted across the country, at800, the organisation responsible for protecting Freeview when 4G at 800 MHz is rolled out across the UK, has provided a new estimate of the likely scale of the impact. If national rollout reflects the results seen during its tests, at800 expects no more than 90,000 households, with Freeview as their primary TV service, [...]
German cable MSO Kabel Deutschland has started transmission of the new DVB-C2 standard on cable channel D794 (794 MHz centre frequency) at ANGA COM 2013 as part of an extended DVB-C2 field trial in its CATV networks in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The field trial will migrate into a regular service as soon as relevant availability of DVB-C2 compliant receivers [...]
News Corp’s Fox Broadcasting has asked a federal appeals court to overrule a district judge and halt Dish Network’s AutoHop ad-skipping service that it says threatens television’s advertising system. Dish’s PrimeTime Anytime allows subscribers to automatically record the entire prime-time line-up of all four major US broadcast networks every night. It’s similar to a VoD service, which Dish can only [...]
The Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) has published a profile of HTML5, CSS, DOM3 and other related web technologies aimed at connected TV services and devices that implement a browser-based application environment. It describes a common profile based on the latest, stable web technologies defined by the W3C that are expected to be implemented by connected TV manufacturers and can be [...]
South Africa’s Minister of Communications Mrs Dina Pule is to refer the question of access to premium TV content to the ICASA regulator. The investigation could affect how MultiChoice/DStv charges – and what access it must provide – for its premium content. A recent formal complaint was made by On Digital Media (which trades as TopTV) alleging anti-competitive behaviour by [...]
Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has belittled attempts by US Senator John McCain to reshape pay-TV bundling practices. Speaking at the Nomura’s Global Media & Telecom Summit in New York, Dauman told the audience that the Senator may have garnered publicity for taking a stand against pay-TV bundling but had no support from his fellow politicians or the public. “McCain got [...]
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has secured another victory as he fights extradition to the US. New Zealand’s Justice Winkelmann says police must return items they seized in the raid on the his mansion. Anything ruled irrelevant to the Internet piracy case has to be returned to Dotcom and police have to contact their counterparts in the US and ask that [...]
Industry bodies HomeGrid Forum and the HomePNA Alliance have merged to create a single organisation focused on promoting advanced wired home networking technologies. The combined entity, under the HomeGrid Forum banner, will promote the smooth transition of all current generation wireline home networking technologies to G.hn, the ‘any wire’ technology defined by ITU-T open international standards. The merged HomeGrid Forum [...]
