UK Culture Secretary Karen Bradley has told Parliament that the government will not make a decision on 21 Century Fox’s bid to acquire the remaining shares in Sky before the parliamentary recess, but said that a decision would be announced “within weeks”. According to Bradley, she remains minded to refer elements of the deal concerning […]
French telco Orange has started legal action against broadcaster TF1 alleging an abuse of dominant power. The dispute is believed to focus on a long-running carriage fee dispute between the two. Reportedly, in April, TF1 issued something of an ultimatum to its distribution clients, including Orange and fellow-telco SFR, and issuing an alleged threat that […]
After publication in the Official Journal of the European Union, Regulation (EU) 2017/1128 of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 14th on cross-border portability of online content services in the internal market enters into force June 20th, although it will not become enforceable until March 20th 2018. The Regulation centres on the […]
French TV regulator CSA has authorised commercial channel TF1 to air a commercial break in news programmes that exceed 30 minutes, within a limit of 12 minutes per hour. In doing so, the CSA has applied the general rule for commercial breaks already authorised to other French broadcasters by a decree-law of 1992, but which […]
Sky has had a broadband TV commercial banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) following a complaint from Virgin Media. The commercial featured the cast from animated movie The Secret Life of Pets, with one character becoming frustrated with their broadband connectivity. Virgin Media challenged a claim in the ad that Sky broadband was “super […]
A nervous BBC struck a hurried deal with then Culture Secretary John Whitingdale (remember him?), because it would rather get a frozen licence fee than risk trying to justify legally obliging the public to handover their money in the teeth of austerity. Alongside the freeze, Whittingdale also made them sign up to publishing all the […]
In tandem with publishing its Annual Report for 2016/17, the BBC has disclosed the amounts paid to staff and talent over £150,000 (€170,000) from the licence fee in the last financial year. Under the terms of its new Charter, the BBC is required to publish an annual report for each financial year from the Remuneration […]
Croatia is planning to switch free-to-air terrestrial TV broadcasting from the DVB-T to the DVB-T2 standard in 2019. According to the Croatian Agency for Postal and Electronic Communications (Hakom), the switch to the more efficient DVB-T2 system with H.265/HEVC video encoding is necessary to enable a more economical transmission of HDTV content on terrestrial networks […]
The French-backed ‘4-Ever’ research and development project has come to an end. Its nine core partners include Orange, France Télévisions, Globecast and ATEME, and the focus was very much on 4K/Ultra HD transmission and in particular how UHD could advance with High Dynamic Range (HDR) and higher frame rates. The research project, under the leadership of […]
Egypt’s Competition Authority (ECA) has repeated that Qatar-based beIN Sports cannot operate or deliver its sports transmissions over Egypt. Currently, Egypt is in a diplomatic dispute with Qatar, which has not helped the situation but in fact the problems with beIN Sports go back to the earlier part of the year, and concerns access to […]