Sky Ireland has confirmed that new and existing Sky Sports subscribers will soon have access to even more great sports at no extra cost, as it adds ESPN and ESPN America to its existing dual sports package from 1st August. Followers of the Barclays Premier League will be able to watch 138 live games on […]
It seems increasingly likely that James Murdoch will be asked to step aside from his chairmanship role at BSkyB while the assorted investigations into News Corp continue. BSkyB’s independent directors are reportedly adamant that until the phone-hacking scandal is resolved – and which has now seen former News of the World editor Colin Myler directly […]
Australia’s competition regulator has raised concerns that the planned A$2 billion takeover of pay-TV operator Austar by rival Foxtel, part owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, could hurt competition on three fronts. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has delayed its decision on Foxtel’s bid until September, a strong indication that it sees problems […]
International private equity firm BC Partners is to buy Com Hem, Sweden’s leading TV, broadband and telephony company, from The Carlyle Group and Providence Equity Partners. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but are understood to be of the order of €1.8 billion. Com Hem has grown to become Sweden’s largest distributor of […]
US phone giant AT&T surprised the industry by announcing that it had added 202,000 net new U-verse pay-TV subscribers between April and June. This takes its total of pay-TV clients to 3.4 million subscribers, up 36 per cent on a year ago, and ahead of Wall Street estimates. The bad news is that AT&T lost […]
Pay-TV group Modern Times Group has published its financial results for the six months ended 30 June 2011. Net sales were up 9 per cent year on year at constant exchange rates and up 3 per cent year on year at reported exchange rates to SEK 3.531 billion (€0,385bn). Record operating income before associated company […]
Digital free-to-air (FTA) channels have overtaken pay TV in Australian metropolitan audience share, with the June figures showing FTA digital’s 20.25 per cent to pay’s 15.42 per cent. Digital FTA channels nudged past pay TV for the first time in January with a 20.04 per cent metro audience share, compared to pay TV’s 18.87 per […]
The phone hacking scandal continues to claim victims; over the weekend former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks was arrested and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson resigned over links to a former News of the World executive who was arrested last week. James Murdoch will have to wait another week or so before learning […]
More than a quarter of the world’s TV households will subscribe to triple-play services of TV, broadband and telephony by 2016, according to Digital TV Research (DTVR). The Triple-Play Forecasts report, which covers 73 countries, estimates that this is up from only 7.1 per cent penetration at end-2010. Report author Simon Murray said that the […]
Martin Whitmarsh, team principal at McLaren, has suggested that although Formula One has benefited from its exposure on television under the sport’s commercial chief Bernie Ecclestone, the changes in technology and media consumption mean that it now needs to reassess how to monetise the new opportunities. Whitmarsh told the sport’s official website, formula1.com, that there […]