Supermarket giant Tesco and Microsoft have signed a collaboration agreement to launch an online video service. Starting in the autumn, Tesco will allow customers in the UK who purchase certain home video titles from Tesco to download ‘digital’ versions of movies to their PCs in a ‘virtual DVD’ experience. In addition, the digital versions will […]
Wall St is speculating General Electric is paving the way for a possible change of the ownership structure at media company NBC Universal as Vivendi's annual option to sell its 20% comes around again in November. The WSJ quoted a source: "Talk to people in the media banking community; there is a book out on […]
NDS has revealed that Sky Deutschland, the largest pay-TV operator in Germany and Austria, has deployed the latest version of NDS MediaHighway middleware to support the launch of its new pay-TV service. The new middleware uses a Flash-based engine to take the TV user interface, graphical experience and ease-of-use to a higher level. New satellite […]
A recent study revealed that media buyers will be increasing their budgets for online video advertising. According to a biannual report from the video advertising network Web TV Enterprise, which surveyed 101 UK media buyers booking pre-roll advertising campaigns, 97 percent were planning on maintaining or increasing video advertising spend. According to the survey, 25 […]
Less than one in two 16 to 34 years olds believe they should pay to download TV and movies from the web, according to The Industry Trust for IP Awareness (Itipa). Despite this, 74 per cent happily pay for cinema tickets and DVDs. Itipa is launching ‘Connected to British Film and TV’, a new awareness […]
The chairman of BBC Worldwide, Etienne de Villiers, is to step down at the end of the month after almost three years in the role. De Villiers, who served on ITV’s board as a non-executive director from 2004 to 2007, was appointed as chairman of the BBC’s commercial holdings board in September 2005 with a […]
The FTTH Council Europe has unveiled the latest figures showing which EU countries are leading the way in the penetration of fibre-to-the-home. Sweden leads the line-up of the top 10 adopters of FTTH services with more than 10 per cent of FTTH penetration, followed by Norway, Slovenia, Andorra, Denmark, Iceland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovakia and […]
The Nielsen Company has reported that as of August 30th 2009, 99.4 per cent of US homes are able to receive digital television signals. This is a gain of more than 572,000 homes in the last month and 1.8 million homes since the week of the June 12th digital television transition. As of August 30th, […]
The European Commission is to investigate Spain's new funding model for state-owned broadcaster RTVE. The new model will see Spain compensating falling advertising revenues with taxes paid by private broadcasters and telecom companies. Private broadcasters will have to allocate 3% of their revenues to public broadcasters, a figure that will be reduced to 1.5% for […]
Appear TV, a global provider of next-generation head-ends for broadcast and IP television, and Satcab, a leading Portuguese systems integrator and Appear TV business partner, has announced that Portugal Telecom, Portugal's leading telecommunications and multimedia service operator, has chosen Appear TV DC1000 head-ends as part of PT's next-generation networks project. The DC1000 head-ends, which are […]