The BBC is abandoning its £98 million+ (€115m) digital production system, as new BBC Director General Tony Hall said it had “wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money”. The Digital Media Initiative (DMI), launched in 2008, was suspended after problems came to light late last year. “I have serious concerns about how we managed this project,” said Hall. [...]

Fresh from its $1.1 billion acquisition of microblogging platform and social networking website Tumblr, Yahoo! is the latest company rumoured to be interested in acquiring online entertainment service Hulu. A blog on the AllThingsD website named Yahoo!, with Bloomberg earlier reporting that KKR & Co. and private equity firm Silver Lake had joined a list of potential suitors that already [...]

Twitter has revealed a new product called Amplify, that it says will help brands match advertisements with Twitter commentary by viewers. Brands can then send messages to selected Twitter users who have already seen their ad on television. Twitter also announced it would work with a number of media companies, including Time Inc., Bloomberg, Discovery, Vevo, Vice Media, Condé Nast [...]

Internet TV streaming service Aereokiller is the subject of a further action claiming copyright infringement, with ABC, NBC and Fox filing a lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Washington DC. Allbritton, which owns ABC’s TV station there, also is a plaintiff in the suit. The complaint is similar to one filed in Los Angeles in August by ABC, NBC [...]

Virgin Media has signed up to be a main sponsorship partner of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. The deal marks Virgin’s first foray into sports sponsorship. Virgin Media said its Commonwealth Games sponsorship deal will include being the presenting partner of athletics, which would likely see brand ambassadors Usain Bolt and Mo Farah appearing in ad campaigns next year, although [...]

Spain’s media group Atresmedia, operator of eight DTT channels among them Antena 3 and La Sexta, is launching a new application called Atresmedia Conecta to allow viewers to interact with TV series and programmes through their smartphones and tablets. The free-of-charge application enables viewers to make comments about programmes and TV series and share them in the social networks. The [...]

M-GO, the digital entertainment service joint venture between DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, has released insight into the streaming habits of US consumers which it says for the first time highlights the differences in streaming behaviour across gender lines, with women leading their male counterparts in certain metrics. The findings are the result of a recent national survey of 1,000 streaming [...]

InMobi, the mobile advertising network, has published its first global report into multi-screen viewing behavior.  The study surveyed 15,000 mobile web users across 14 markets and provides insight into the ways in which consumers engage with content across multiple screens. The report uncovers that mobile now ranks first in media consumption among mobile web users, who now consume 108 minutes [...]

Following on from the ZEEL improved profits picture on May 23rd comes Subash Chandra’s other major investment, Dish TV, which also announced its results. The numbers show that Dish has halved its losses, and added a net 200,000 subs this past quarter taking the total DTH subscribers to 10.7 million.  Dish dominates India’s DTH market with a 27 per cent [...]

Turkish cable platform Teledunya has partnered with Nat Geo sister business Fox International Channels (FIC) to launch the NatGeo Play app, which carries full streamed episodes of series such as Doomsday Preppers and Mega Factories. The deal marks the PC and iPad app’s debut in the country. All videos included in the iPad version feature AirPlay technology, aloowing them be [...]

In partnership with Imagine Media, Trace Sports is celebrating launching in Israel for the first time. The channel’s most recent agreement sees it sign a carriage deal with HOT, the Israeli triple play provider. HOT has more than 900,000 subscribers – approximately 60 per cent of the country’s multi-channel television market share. Trace Sports will launch in Israel as a [...]

Level 3 Communications has confirmed it is providing video broadcast services to enable FOX Network to deliver the live feed of the UEFA Champions League final to viewers across the US. This year, the final match features Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund, and will take place May 25th at Wembley Stadium. Level 3′s global fibre network is directly connected to [...]

In less than 4 weeks from now a mini-constellation of four satellites will lift off from French Guiana . The project is called O3b (standing for the “other 3 billion) and is designed to provide connection services to these other 3 billion of the planet’s population totally without broadband or without an adequate broadband service. The constellation will provide connectivity [...]

Chello Central Europe’s children’s channel Megamax is now available on two new platforms in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, further extending the channel’s reach in the region. Megamax is now available on the Slovak Magio Sat DTH and Czech Rio Media platforms. Megamax offers local-dubbed versions of popular cutting-edge animated content from around the globe including Transformers, Gormiti, Lego Ninjago, [...]