Sky1 has appointed the BBC’s Lucy Lumsden as the satellite channel’s first head of comedy. Lumsden worked with Stuart Murphy, programme director of Sky 1, on many of BBC3’s early comedy successes. ….

A woman in Minnesota, USA has been ordered to pay $80,000 a song to record companies for illegally downloading tracks and violating copyright laws. A federal jury ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset wilfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded record companies $1.92 million. She was found liable for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network […]

Sixty per cent of US households accessed the Internet via broadband in 2008, according to a report published by analyst firm Strategy Analytics, compared to 95 per cent of South Korean households. This number puts the US in 20th place out of 58 leading countries worldwide. Five of the top ten scorers in the Strategy […]

Nielsen Online has released overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for May 2009. Compared to the same month in 2008, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 49 per cent growth in time per viewer. YouTube was far and away […]

The global number of users paying for mobile video services will grow five-fold from 2008 to 2014, surpassing 534 million, with a substantial proportion of mobile net additions coming from emerging markets, according to a report from Pyramid Research, the telecom research arm of the Light Reading Communications Network. Video is increasingly making its way […]

TelstraClear has contracted two leading developers to deliver a next generation personal video recorder (PVR) for its cable television customers. IPTV solutions provider Digisoft and content security specialist Verimatrix will jointly develop a hybrid HD DVB–C set-top box with PVR, IPTV and supporting services in New Zealand. The PVR will be future proofed to deliver […]

Zeng Peixian, deputy director of the Radio, Film & TV Administration of Guangdong Province, has revealed that DTV subscribers in Guangdong now number 5.17 million. Digital conversion work in county levels and above in Guangdong province is expected to be essentially completed by the end of 2009. Digital subscribers currently number over 1 million each […]

Sci Fi has been found to be in "serious and significant" breach of its licence conditions after the channel failed to produce a recording of its output. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received a viewer complaint over the volume levels of commercials on Virgin Media feed. The ASA brought in Ofcom when Sci Fi admitted […]

The membership of the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) has been reinforced by the addition of four significant new members. British Telecom, Pirelli, Netgem and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have joined the effort to develop open, end-to-end specifications for IPTV; based on existing technologies and open standards

Eight per cent of consumers across the UK, France, Germany and the USA admitted to downloading video content illegally from file sharing websites, a consumer research study by Futuresource Consulting reveals. The study, 'Living With Digital: Consumer Insights into Entertainment Consumption', used a representative sample in each country and provided respondents with a list of […]