French pay TV operator Canal Plus and French telco Orange have dropped their plan to form a 50/50 joint venture between Canal Plus’s TPS Star service and Orange’s film and TV series channels, according to reports in French newspapers. A new plan to see Canal Plus buy a minority stake in Orange’s channels has been […]
Christine Ockrent has quit as the head of France 24 the government funded news channel broadcast in French, English and Arabic, amid accusations of espionage, harassment and incompetence. The network – intended to take in the BBC, CNN and al-Jazeera has struggled to make an impact and will losw about €7 million this year. Ockrent, […]
BBC’s Vision is axing about 100 jobs in the next year and scrapping the roles of multi-platform commissioners, as part of the wider BBC Online cuts. “The existing multiplatform commissioning team will be disbanded within BBC Vision, with commissioning to be run at genre/ channel level,” says BBC Online general manager Andy Conroy. “This means […]
A possible merger between the USA’s two satellite pay-TV giants DirecTV and Dish Network is a topic that we have already covered earlier this year. Now, however, we have the fresh knowledge that newly appointed Dish Network CEO Joe Clayton also agrees it is a possibility. This is not to say it will happen, of […]
Austar United Communications, the Australian pay-television group majority owned by Liberty Global, has said that a $2 billion takeover bid from rival Foxtel had been pitched at an “appropriate” value. The offer from Foxtel, half-owned by Australian telco Telstra with 25 per cent stakes held by News Corp and James Packer’s Consolidated Media, potentially ends […]
The recommendations of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to raise FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) ceiling for DTH, IPTV from 49 per cent to 74 per cent have been “accepted” by the I&B Ministry. The recommendations have been accepted to bring parity between DTH and IPTV operators with other service providers said a Ministry […]
Harvard International has announced a partnership with ANT, a provider of software and services for the delivery of digital TV, to design and develop software for the next generation of STB products. These will provide HD DTR (high definition digital television recorder) functionality and enable the delivery of services that combine digital media with broadband […]
French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened the first e-G8 forum in Paris declaring that “[the Internet] you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and more generally all the basic rules that govern society in democratic countries do not apply.” France has been in the vanguard of trying to protect rights holder […]
David Abraham, the chief executive of Channel 4, has called on Ofcom to investigate the control of audience data after warning that valuable information is being “controlled and commercially exploited” by others. Abraham said that audience data is the “new oil, or soil, of television” and that as viewing behaviour becomes increasingly measurable through interactivity […]
The newly released BroadbandSuite 4.1 extends the work of previous technical requirements to let service providers pinpoint problems that can emerge as consumers attach many new devices to their broadband services, such as Internet-enabled TVs and energy management sensors. Those new devices, as well as services such as home security and remote energy management, represent […]