From Branislav Pekic Rome Portugal's Minister for Parliamentary Issues, responsible for the Social Communications Portfolio, has rejected subsidising DTT decoders, pointing out that the Government does not have the obligation of paying for digital TVs or decoding devices. “The incentives that the Government has already made available are for the improvement of the offer via […]
From David Del Valle in Madrid Spain has failed to switch off Local TV analogue transmissions breaking the law that stated that from January 1st all 1,000 existing local TV stations should be migrating to digital. Two years before the complete migration to digital, scheduled for April 2010 for nation wide TV channels, the road […]
From Sotires Eleftheriou in Paris In a surprise announcement President Sarkozy said that the government is looking to drop ads from the public sector television and radio channels. These are currently financed by a licence fee of E116 a year, with advertising bringing in an extra E800 million, providing France 2 with 40 per cent […]
Portugal will auction a free-to-air TV licence for a national channel to compete with the four existing ones. The new channel will be carried on a DTT platform, along with simulcasts from pubcaster channels RTP1 and RTP2 plus commercial webs TVI and SIC. The announcement of a new general entertainment channel is likely to spark […]
China Netmedia, a consulting arm of the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) has revealed that as of November 31, 2007 the number of cable DTV subscribers in China reached 23.65 million. The figure represents a year-on-year increase of 81.3 per cent and growth of over 200 per cent in the last 4 […]
According to a survey by Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM), there is growing awareness of the nation's February 2009 transition to digital television by US TV broadcasters. However, the group of Americans with the lowest level of awareness about the transition includes those that are most deeply affected – households that receive television […]
From Branislav Pekic in Rome There were nearly 1.500 digital TV channels available in Italy and in 2006 they earned E2.5 billion, according to the New TV Observatory of the School of Management of Milan's Polytechnic. The Observatory divided the channels into three categories, on the basis of the six platforms currently available (DTT, IPTV, […]
According to Ofcom figures, Freeview achieved near-record sales of 2.4 million digital television receivers in the third quarter of 2007. The media regulator’s quarterly digital TV progress report, for the three months to the end of September, showed that 361,700 households that had been analogue-only went digital during the period. This was down from 944,200 […]
Australia's Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy minister Stephen Conroy has ordered that free-to-air television be broadcast only in a digital signal in all major cities by 2009 with a final switch-over across the nation by 2013. The Howard government before the 2004 election had proposed a date of 2008 for the switch Conroy said moving […]
From Branislav Pekic in Rome The 2012 deadline for the definite switchover from analogue to digital terrestrial TV is too far away, according to the president of Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri. Speaking at a DTT convention in Turin, the head of Italy's largest private broadcaster admitted that the initial deadline of 2006 was “too optimistic”, but […]