Reports have emerged in the Israeli business press that senior executives at MX1 (the former RR Media) have been accused of allegedly “swindling…and acting utterly illegally and in complete violation of agreements they signed” when the business was acquired by satellite operator SES. The then NASDAQ-listed RR Media was acquired by SES in 2016 (the […]
BBC Director-General Tony Hall has said the corporation needs to reinvent its on-demand iPlayer service to make the leap from a catch-up service to a “must-visit” destination in its own right in the face of rapid growth by its competitors such as Netflix. In a wide-ranging New Year message to BBC staff on ‘Reinventing the […]
The European Commission is referring Spain to the Court of Justice under Article 108(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The move follows Spain’s failure to recover subsidies it granted to finance the transition from analogue to digital terrestrial television (DTT) in remote areas of, respectively, Castilla-la-Mancha and the rest […]
Consultancy firm Strategy Analytics has recommended that mobile operators, especially those with multi-screen assets and ambitions to provide superior mobile video and data experiences to customers, adopt eMBMS, or LTE Broadcast, more aggressively. In its report, Time For Operators To Embrace LTE Broadcast, the firm suggests
The European Commission is working on much stricter rules covering the use of computer data code in the form of ‘cookies’. The scheme has been around for some times but French business newspaper Les Echoes says the concept is now gathering steam. In essence, the EC project will force web-site browsers to move to a […]
At CES in Las Vegas, 28 companies announced the Virtual Reality Industry Forum (VRIF), a not-for-profit company with its purpose stated as: “To further the widespread availability of high-quality audiovisual VR experiences, for the benefit of consumers”. The Founding Members of VRIF are Akamai Technologies, ARRIS International, b<>com, Baylor University, CableLabs, Cinova Media, Dolby Laboratories, […]
The Ultra HD Forum, the global organisation defining industry best practices for the introduction of technologies to facilitate the ultra-HD viewing experience, has released version 1.2 of its Ultra HD Phase A industry guidelines. “Ultra HD Phase A” encompasses practices and technologies that are commercially feasible in UHD services today. This revision builds on best […]
As of January 1st, the sale of TV sets with DVB-T/MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 encoding is no longer allowed in Italy. Retailers can market only TV sets with tuner compatible with the new second-generation digital terrestrial standard DVBT-2/HEVC, which allows for more efficient use of frequencies by an estimated 30 per cent compression of the signal. […]
Industry body the Streaming Video Alliance – whose members include a broad range of suppliers, distributors and programmers – has confirmed that trials based on recently-approved Open Caching Request Routing and HTTPS Delegation Technical Specification are to begin. The trials are the first implementation by Alliance member companies of open caching systems that incorporate the […]
The South Korean government is planning to deregulate the domestic pay-TV industry to facilitate mergers and acquisitions among cable TV, satellite broadcasting and IPTV service providers with the intention of enhancing their competitiveness in the global market. The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning said that it would apply the same regulation to the […]