Vivendi staffers, including those working for Canal Plus, are seriously backing their employer with their wallets. Around 10,000 staff have participated in Vivendi’s capital increase, and spending €126.9 million in a share-buying spree. Vivendi’s employees bought 12.3 million new shares, and now own 3.4 per cent of the business and are the fourth-largest shareholder group […]

South Africa’s media regulator ICASA has set July 30th as the date for written submissions to be made on its latest proposed regulations covering digital terrestrial broadcasting. ICASA says it will then fast-track the new rules and produce its final regulations by September. ICASA says there are two main changes to the regulations on which […]

Netflix shares jumped 20.6 per cent this past week after a July 3rd Facebook post by company founder and CEO Reed Hastings congratulating chief content officer Ted Sarandos and his team with helping Netflix exceed 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June. The stock had closed at $67.85 on July 2nd and […]

Eutelsat has published some highly competitive rates for its consumer-based Tooway business, which uses its massive Ka-Sat satellite.  In a fresh report on Eutelsat, bankers Morgan Stanley says the satellite operator’s rates for satellite-were “pretty punchy” and compared very well with the sort of prices and usage caps applied by the likes of British Telecom […]

Eutelsat deservedly won plenty of editorial space last week with its news that its Ka-Sat multiple spot beam satellite was now offering a series of extremely competitive TooWay residential ‘broadband-by-satellite’ services. Eutelsat’s TooWay, said a Press Release, would offer users speeds of up to 18Mbps, an increase of 8Mbps. The release quoted a price of […]

July 4th was YouView’s launch day in the UK when Britain’s ‘TV Apprentice’ host, Lord Alan Sugar, unveiled the service and explained the project’s roll-out plans. In a report issued just hours ahead of Lord Sugar’s early morning presentation, investment bankers Morgan Stanley issued their own comments on the impact YouView might have on the […]

The annual ‘Space News’ list of satellite operators has tended these past few years to be a simple repeat of the previous year’s rankings. In fact there’s usually more interest in the lower-ranked players where there’s more jockeying for position. This year, as last, it is Intelsat that’s officially the world’s largest satellite operator with […]

Sony and Panasonic’s joint plans for mass-production of giant OLED screens will start making an impact on availability in 2013. But don’t expect prices to come tumbling down soon. Both Panasonic and Sony will want to recover some of their initial R&D costs, so the retail cost of these 55″ behemoths will be high. Research […]

Rupert Murdoch said in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry that an unhinged Gordon Brown phoned him and said he would make war on News Corp. Brown, in evidence, claimed the call never took place. Whose relationship with the truth is closer? My guess is both have only had a nodding acquaintance with veracity for some […]

The joke in the industry – totally unfairly – is that Greece’s national telco OTE started looking for a buyer of HellasSat just before the foundation stones were laid on the Athens Acropolis. However, OTE is now beginning to get some traction from sales efforts on other parts of its non-local portfolio of assets.  Globul, […]