Yesterday’s news that Sky has signed a pan-European agreement with US premium programming giant Showtime (itself part of the CBS/Viacom empire) is more good news for the pay-TV broadcaster. The news helped balance what is proving to be a challenging pre-results period for Sky. Equity analysts are concerned over how well Germany and Italy are […]
Verizon Communications added just 20,000 FiOS TV customers in the fourth quarter, its weakest additions since launching the service in 2006, and further evidence that cord-cutting is beginning to chip away at what once was pay-TV’s most reliable growth engine. FiOS TV ended the fourth quarter with 5.8 million customers. Broadband growth also slowed in […]
The Stop Mega Cable Coalition has been launched with the goal of raising awareness about what it suggests are “the substantial harms” that Charter Communication’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks could cause for the cable TV and broadband markets. Chief among those concerns is the fact that the merger would […]
Pay-TV in the Dominican Republic continues to go from strength to strength. Fresh data from the country’s regulator (Institute of Telecommunications of the Dominican Republic, Indotel) says that Q3/2015 saw another significant uplift to the nation’s pay-TV subscribers, and took the growth overall for the first 9 months of the year to 19 per cent […]
UK commercial broadcaster Channel 4 has confirmed the ten Formula 1 Grands Prix it will broadcast live in 2016, which will include the 2016 Formula 1 British Grand Prix on July 10th. Channel 4 took over the UK free-to-air rights from the BBC as the Corporation withdrew from its contract as part of its cost-cutting […]
Findings from Hub Entertainment Research have identified three key obstacles to TV Everywhere adoption. The firm suggests that everything about the concept of ‘TV Everywhere’ seems like a win-win: Pay-TV customers enjoy the benefit of access to their subscription content on a variety of devices, at no additional cost; TV networks and MVPDs give customers […]
Spain’s Telefonica is reportedly interested in buying AT&T’s pay-TV assets in Latin America, with an enterprise value of over €9 billion, in an attempt to strengthen its presence in the continent. AT&T bought the Latin America assets as part of its acquisition of DirecTV last year. The business includes satellite and cable television services in […]
Italian commercial broadcaster RTI-Mediaset has sued pay-TV operator Sky Italia for damages due to the illegal “retransmission of its former analogue TV channels on satellite”, reports daily La Repubblica, In its defence, Sky Italia states that the Mediaset channels are available in the clear to all, with any satellite receiver, and without the need for […]
A few months ago industry observers were worried that Dish Network was struggling to sell its Sling TV ‘pay-TV lite’ offering. The most recent numbers from Dish, issued last June, put the subs total at just 240,000. But a fresh look at the numbers by equity analysts at bankers Goldman Sachs are suggesting that the […]
OTT provision is now part of the mainstream – but is also still evolving rapidly. All TV providers, pay and FTA, now feel obliged to supply catch up and back catalogue services. Mainly they are cost centres without much prospect of becoming profit centres. What next? And where will the money come from? Advanced Television […]