Chris Forrester is one of the most experienced and highly regarded journalists in the field. His insight and analysis, particularly in the satellite and pay-TV arena, is highly prized. He has written for all the major business journals in the sector as well as several national newspapers.
The FCC’s latest spectrum auction has something of a twist, in that current holders of valuable spectrum can sell off unwanted bandwidth in the auction. Nevertheless, the FCC is expecting another set of records will be broken and observers have suggested that anything between $60-$100 billions-worth of bandwidth will be re-allocated as ‘old’ TV broadcast […]
Satellite giant Intelsat has an operation underway where it is seeking to repay some of its ‘Senior Note’ debts by an early redemption and at a significant discount to their face value. In total Intelsat is happy to pay up to $625 million in total for a batch of Notes originally due for redemption in […]
Last week, satellite operator raised €900 million in order to complete the purchase of mini-satellite constellation O3b. At least one investment bank is asking why SES has moved on O3b now, and so soon after the significant profits warning from Eutelsat. “With the Eutelsat profit warning just 2 weeks ago pointing to dramatic change in […]
Many of us spend far too long in our vehicles but AT&T, which now owns pay-TV operator DirecTV, says it wants to beam a portfolio of channels and content into its subscriber’s vehicle. While drivers – and their families – can already access some live entertainment programming from their ‘smart’ devices via cellular links, Chris […]
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is looking at a new proposal which would require all DTH broadcasters to use one ISRO-built satellite. If carried out, the move would eliminate non-Indian satellite operators from beaming their signals into India. ISRO licenses all DTH channels, irrespective of whether they use ISRO satellites of those from foreign providers […]
Viacom has been making near-daily headline news for the wrong reasons with many in the company and entertainment industry generally being focused on a sordid series of legal claims and counter-claims over the state of health of Viacom’s increasingly frail founder Sumner Redstone. Last week it was revealed that Viacom’s CEO Philippe Dauman had been […]
SES CEO, Karim Michel Sabbagh, has complained that the market doesn’t appreciate the quite dramatic changes that the satellite industry is going through. The past week or so has seen significant market value reverses for the share prices of SES, Eutelsat in particular, and Inmarsat. He explained that the traditional market view of the industry, […]
SES was also badly affected by last week’s market anxieties over Eutelsat. While Eutelsat’s share price crashed some 30 per cent, SES was also impacted by the general depression revolving around satellite’s future prospects, and in particular the risk of over-capacity. SES’s CEO Karim Michel Sabbagh, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, stressed […]
When a business has received a brutal beating and a very bloody nose from a dismayed stock market there’s not much that can be done other than to get back on one’s feet and start fighting back. The bloody nose was given to satellite operator Eutelsat last week when the company issued a profit warning, […]
Equity analysts from some of the London investment banks recently sat down with Sky’s senior management and some interesting views emerged, not least with the prospects from the upcoming auctions for Sky’s German football rights. One report, from Exane/BNP-Paribas, said that Sky’s staffers argued that a combination of upselling a wider portfolio of products (broadband, […]
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