Advanced Television

Trace Sports carriage deal with United Group

Trace Sport Stars has launched for the first time in South-Eastern Europe, following a carriage deal with United Group, the leading telco in the region, combining SBB Serbia, Telemach Slovenia and Telemach Bosia-Herzegovina. Trace Sport Stars is now available to United Group customers via the HD package, immediately reaching over 20,000 subs on channel number […]

September 1, 2014

Channel 5 selects Fonix for mobile services

Fonix, a specialist in mobile messaging, payments and telephony and UK commercial broadcaster Channel 5 have announced a two year partnership. The deal is focused on developing engagement between Channel 5’s audience through mobile interactive services, driving returns for the broadcaster and value to the audience. Using a suite of Fonix solutions including mobile messaging […]

September 1, 2014

More UHD TVs shipped in Q2 than all of 2013

More Ultra-HD TV sets were shipped in Q2 2014 than shipped all year in 2013. According to the NPD DisplaySearch Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report, 2.1 million sets were shipped in Q2, compared to 1.6 million in 2013. Brands introduced their 2014 model ranges in Q2, with a clear focus on Ultra-HD as the […]

August 29, 2014

DOCSIS channels pass 1m in Q2

Infonetics Research has released excerpts from its 2nd quarter 2014 CCAP, CMTS, and Edge QAM Hardware and Subscribers report, which tracks cable broadband equipment and subscribers. “Easily beating last quarter’s record, combined CCAP (converged cable access platform) and CMTS upstream and downstream DOCSIS channel shipments reached 1.2 million in the second quarter of 2014, the […]

August 29, 2014

Vivendi picks Telefonica for GVT sale

Vivendi has picked Telefonica for exclusive talks over the sale of its Brazilian broadband unit GVT, spurning a rival bid from Telecom Italia. Telefonica will fold GVT into its Brazilian mobile phone carrier Vivo to create the country’s biggest telecom group. It will then use GVT’s pay-TV and broadband know-how and its broad network to […]

August 29, 2014

Telenet goes for 1GHz

Belgium’s Telenet is to invest a total of €500 million to upgrade the cable network in Flanders to Europe’s first 1Gb network. Telenet will be upgrading from 600 MHz to 1 GHz, as a result in time the network will be able to support connection speeds of at least 1Gb/s. The investment project will create […]

August 29, 2014

Singer: ‘Majority streaming UltraViolet’

Although originally conceived as a download model, Mitch Singer, president of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the industry consortium behind digital content ecosystem UltraViolet has admitted that the majority of consumers are using its capabilities to stream their content. Participating in a Digital Hollywood-organised Live Webcast on ‘Internet TV – The Disruption – Cord […]

August 29, 2014By Colin Mann

BBC, CNN tieing for global news audiences

Research from ComScore has revealed that the BBC’s global audience has grown by 30 per cent since 2012 to 73.4 million unique browsers – just 200,000 (0.27 per cent) short of CNN’s 73.6 million. The competition to claim the top spot in online news intensified in July as the BBC outpaced the market to overtake […]

August 29, 2014

Ex-Disney exec is Sony Russia chief

Sony Pictures Television (SPT) has hired Vadim Sokolovsky, a former Disney Russia producer, to run its production business in Russia following the exit of Maria Smirnova to CTC. Sokolovsky will manage all aspects of Sony’s television production business in Russia, including development, sales and production of programming, as well as the financial performance, strategic vision, […]

August 29, 2014

NileSat takes Libyan channels down

BBC Monitoring is reporting that Cairo-based NileSat has taken nine satellite TV channels off air. They are all seen as pro-Islamist, and the action has been taken in response from Libya’s interim government. The channels shut down are Libya Al-Wataniyah 1 [National Libyan TV 1], Libya Al-Wataniyah 2 [National Libyan TV 2], Libya Sport 1, […]

August 29, 2014By Chris Forrester