The Walt Disney Company has acquired Lucasfilm from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion (€3.12bn) in stock and cash. Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said Disney planned to revive the Star Wars movie franchise and release a seventh feature film in the series in 2015, with new films coming every two or three […]
Panasonic has warned it will lose nearly $10 billion for the second consecutive year, against an earlier prediction that it would return to profit. The company said it expected to end the financial year to next March with a net loss of Y765 billion ($9.6bn), a dramatic reversal of its previous forecast for a Y50 […]
Reports confirm that some North Eastern cable MSO’s have been badly hurt by Hurricane Sandy. Cablevision, in particular, which serves much of New York, New Jersey and Long Island, confirmed it was suffering from power outages and “widespread service interruptions”. Telco Verizon, which serves New York had half-a-metre of water in its 140 West Street […]
Indian government officials are determined to switch off analogue TV signals on Thursday in the four giant metropolitan cities that ought to have converted to digital TV by October 31st. Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata will see analogue systems go ‘dark’ says India’s Information & Broadcasting Ministry, and officials intend ensuring that transmission rules are […]
With more and more video content produced every day, and more of that content being made available over the Internet either live and/or on demand, the market for the multiformat transcoders that process the content has risen right alongside the content, according to a report from Multimedia Research Group (MRG). The transcoder market can be […]
Walmart, the biggest retail chain in the US, is to start selling the Boxee TV on November 1st. Boxee unveiled the product earlier this month, saying that it should be considered a “No Limits DVR.” The device, which connects to the television, has no onboard storage, but acts as a DVR, thanks to cloud storage. […]
Iran’s Ambassador to France has strongly criticised satellite operator Eutelsat for taking down his state-backed IRIB television and radio channels. Ambassador Ali Ahani met with Eutelsat’s CEO Michel de Rosen, and subsequently issued a statement. “Depriving millions of viewers and listeners of television and radio programs of different channels of the Islamic Republic of Iran […]
Farncombe and Intertrust Technologies have confirmed the implementation of a common encryption system for IP multicast. The move potentially enables IPTV companies to adopt a ‘Simulcrypt’ model over their networks combining both Conditional Access (CA) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies – thereby enabling seamless secure content distribution to a variety of devices using different […]
Quickflix, the Australian movie streaming and rental company, delivered stronger growth in the September quarter as it resumed a focus on subscriber acquisition following its successful rollout of digital streaming over previous quarters. Whilst continuing to invest in new content and integration of its pay-per-view and subscription streaming service in new consumer devices, the company […]
Hurricane Sandy generated more than a half-billion page views during Monday’s bad weather in the USA. It came from some 450 million page views on the channel’s various mobile and on-line sites, as well as another 298 million page views on Weather.com, a sister-site. The numbers were records for the channel, and were double those […]