Ericsson has acquired HyC Group, a leading Spanish company in TV consultancy and systems integration. The acquisition further strengthens Ericsson’s position in the services and multimedia domains as a systems integrator of IPTV solutions. The HyC acquisition follows Ericsson’s acquisition of Tandberg Television, provider of advanced video compression technologies, at the beginning of the year. […]
Channel Four has been fined £1.5 million by media watchdog Ofcom for misconduct involving phone-in competitions on popular programmes Richard and Judy and Deal or No Deal. Viewers were urged to call a premium number after contestants had already been chosen on Richard and Judy. Deal or No Deal selected competition finalists in a way […]
Media enterprise the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) will begin featuring select full-length programming on Joost, the Internet television service. At launch, the PBS offering will include popular series, such as History Detectives and Scientific American Frontiers, as well as specials from PBS' award-winning 'Empires' collection. Separately, satellite operator DirecTV revealed a deal to carry Public […]
Envivio, technology provider of IP video convergence encoding solutions, is providing a Convergence Generation video headend to Norwegian ISP RingNett AS to enable the roll out of its Digital-TV IPTV service across its ADSL2+ infrastructure. RingNett's Digital-TV service is already available to test customers subscribing to its optical fibre-based GPON high speed Internet delivery service. […]
Manufacturers of high-definition DVD players are slashing prices in the US in an urgent pre-Christmas attempt to break the deadlock between two rival formats. The cost of key manufacturing components for the Sony-supported Blu-ray players and Toshiba's rival HD-DVD hardware will fall below $150 early in 2008, according to analysts at Understanding & Solutions entertainment […]
From Colin Mann in London The UK's anti-trust watchdog, the Competition Commission has recommended that BSkyB should be forced to sell some of the 17.9 per cent stake in ITV it acquired in November 2006. The regulator has recommended to Business Secretary John Hutton that BSkyB should either sell all of its shares or cut […]
From David Del Valle in Madrid The Spanish media group Prisa, owner of newspaper El Pais, has launched a bid for the rest of Sogecable, Spain’s largest pay-TV group, that it does not already own, valuing the pay-TV operator, owner of Digital DTH platform Digital Plus and premium channel Canal Plus, at E3.8 billion. Prisa […]
From Branislav Pekic in Rome There were nearly 1.500 digital TV channels available in Italy and in 2006 they earned E2.5 billion, according to the New TV Observatory of the School of Management of Milan's Polytechnic. The Observatory divided the channels into three categories, on the basis of the six platforms currently available (DTT, IPTV, […]
Philips Electronics has reached an agreement in principle to sell its Set-Top Boxes (STB) and Connectivity Solutions (CS) businesses to UK-based technology provider Pace Micro Technology. Philips will sell the businesses to Pace in exchange for 70 million Pace shares. Philips will retain 22.5 per cent of the enlarged share capital of Pace. The deal […]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has adopted rules to promote video programming diversity by ensuring new video programmers can enter and compete in the video market. An Order adopted by the Commission sets the number of subscribers a cable operator may serve at 30 per cent nationwide. In a further notice also adopted, the Commission […]