US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin (LM) is to participate in the development of the UK’s first commercial spaceport at a seaside site near Melness, in Sutherland, Scotland. LM, making the announcement at the Farnborough Air Show, said that as part of the scheme it will provide “strategic support and guidance” to the overall site development. […]
Last week, the FCC said that the proposal from Intelsat, SES, Eutelsat and Intel for a restructuring of their C-band capacity over the US can proceed to the next stage. But reading the small print in the form of comments from the four Commissioners, who voted 4-0 in favour of the scheme, throws up some […]
Last week Inmarsat’s board firmly rejected a second tentative bid from EchoStar, which had talked about paying £5.32 a share for the London-based global satellite operator. A report from the equity team at Berenberg Bank suggests it is now time for Inmarsat to lay its cards on the table, given that the operator’s somewhat volatile […]
Airbus Space & Defence is already involved in an $85 million joint-venture with would-be satellite operator OneWeb to build a satellite manufacturing factory at Port Canaveral, in Florida. The plan is to shortly start building the first of an initial 900 satellites for the SoftBank-backed OneWeb project to girdle the planet with a new constellation […]
The UK television industry – and by extension the whole digital media, tech and creative industries – need a hard hat as Brexit approaches. This is because the consequences that will rain down from a hard Brexit will be excrement of the toughest variety, polished or not. To try and avoid a hard Brexit for […]
EchoStar last week decided to walk away from its pursuit of Inmarsat having tried a £5.32 per share bid. EchoStar now cannot re-bid for the next six months unless invited to do so by Inmarsat. However, Sami Kassab, an equity analyst at investment bank Exane/BNPP suggests an alternate scenario, and asks whether Charlie Ergen, founder […]
Malaysian satellite operator Measat says it is looking to order a major ‘high throughput satellite’ (HTS) that it wants in orbit by 2021. Speaking at the APSAT conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, Measat’s COO Yau Chyong Lim said the new craft would be co-located with its other satellites at its ‘hot spot’ at 91.5 degree East. […]
Not so many years ago Intelsat and SES were arguing strongly for satellite’s C-band frequencies to be protected from would-be predators especially those in the cellular community. Now, with the potential of millions (and some say billions) of dollars of benefits to flow to satellite operators from reassigning some C-band frequencies over the US for […]
A provocative comment on the future of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) consumer take-up comes from specialist publication Display Daily, and asks whether VR will go the way of 3D. Steve Sechrist, a well-regarded industry analyst, asks when will consumers start buying into to face-worn technology. His own answer is that it should have […]
Analysts at Dataxis have recently published their Q1 statistics on the European pay-TV market, and say that the total subscriber numbers rose just 0.3 per cent compared to Q4/2017. This has prompted a note to clients from investment bank Exane/BNPP which points out that this is the lowest net growth ever observed by Dataxis. The […]