Advanced Television

Regulation

Study: Anti-piracy efforts halve pirate ad revenue

A new study, Measuring Digital Advertising Revenue to Infringing Sites, from The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) – an advertising industry initiative to fight criminal activity in the digital advertising supply chain – has found that anti-piracy steps taken by the digital advertising industry have reduced ad revenue for pirate sites by between 48 and 61 […]

October 5, 2017By Colin Mann

MPAA warns of emerging Kodi threat

Charles Rivkin, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has warned US trade representatives of what he describes as an emerging global threat of streaming piracy which is enabled by piracy devices preloaded with software to illicitly stream movies and television programming, posing a “significant and evolving challenge”. In formal comments submitted to […]

October 4, 2017By Colin Mann

80% of Net Neutrality posts to FCC are bots

More than 80 per cent of the comments submitted to the FCC on the future of net neutrality came from bots, according to data analytics company Gravwell, which said only 17.4 per cent of the comments were unique. Most of the 22 million comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission over the summer had been […]

October 4, 2017

HK: Infringing list cuts piracy website traffic by 14%

The pilot run of the Infringing Website List (IWL) Scheme established by the Hong Kong Creative Industries Association (HKCIA) has resulted in the removal of advertisements on infringing websites by 50 brands in Hong Kong and reduced traffic of a number of infringing websites by 14 per cent on average. Launched in December 2016, the […]

October 4, 2017By Colin Mann

Italian government orders increased local content

The Italian government has issued a decree imposing increased local content quotas on national TV channels. Italian TV channels must now increase their output of Italian movies and TV series aired during primetime hours (6pm to 11pm), and also make compulsory content investments, subject to severe sanctions. In practice, this means that each national TV […]

October 3, 2017From Branislav Pekic in Rome

MPs to quiz Ofcom on Sky takeover

UK communications regulator Ofcom is to face questions from parliament’s House of Commons Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee on October 10th. It is expected that the session will cover the Fox/Sky merger, BBC regulation, and the impact of Brexit. Representing Ofcom will be Sharon White, Chief Executive of Ofcom and Dame Patricia Hodgson, Chairman […]

October 3, 2017By Colin Mann

Cable Europe: ‘No need for more competition rules’

Industry trade body Cable Europe has once again called upon European Institutions to stand by the original goals of the proposed Electronic Communications Code, as the European Parliament’s ITRE Committee adopted a number of amendments October 2nd. The body commended the Committee for its work to date, but warned against the consequences of introducing legal […]

October 3, 2017

EFF: Kodi lawsuits “abusive”

Advocacy body the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – which defends civil liberties in the digital world – has described recent initiatives by copyright enforcement bodies against preconfigured Kodi boxes as “abusive”, suggesting that courts should reject such expansions of copyright liability. In a Deeplinks Blog Post, The War on General-Purpose Computing Turns on the Streaming […]

October 2, 2017By Colin Mann

IDATE: OTT becoming natural candidate for regulation

The OTT competitive landscape is dominated by a handful of players with a worldwide approach, according to an IDATE report. They clearly have a dominant position in data-based markets such as search, ecommerce, cloud, social networks, online advertising, says the research and consultancy firm. This obviously raises regulation

October 2, 2017

Report: UK broadband, mobile markets ‘concentrated’

The Social Market Foundation (SMF) – an independent, non-partisan think tank – says that big companies in UK sectors such as broadband, mobile telephony and personal banking don’t face enough competition, meaning that consumers are hit with a lack of choice, higher prices and underinvestment, suggesting that part of the increased concentration seen in the […]

October 2, 2017By Colin Mann