A French TV report says that the recent agreement between Vivendi and sports rights-holder beIN Sport, and which sees Canal Plus gaining access to some of beIN’s sports events, is going to extremely expensive for Canal Plus Group. Canal Plus is paying beIN more than €300 million annually for access to beIN’s rights, with Canal […]
Investment bankers Morgan Stanley is slashing its share price target for satellite operator Intelsat to just $1 (from its earlier target of $5) and a 64 per cent discount to the operator’s closing price on March 21st. Morgan Stanley is maintaining its “Underweight” rating to investors. Intelsat’s share price has tumbled some 72 per cent […]
Last week, Hong Kong-based AsiaSat unveiled lower revenues (down 4 per cent) for 2015 and said it expected more headwinds for 2016 as pricing pressures from competitors force down transponder and bandwidth rental prices. AsiaSat’s chairman, Ju Wei Min, in a statement, warned shareholders that the satellite operator was being squeezed and non-renewals of contracts […]
Last week rocket company SpaceX said it expected satellite launch costs to fall some 30 per cent once it had perfected its landing and thus re-use of its Falcon-9 rockets. The news was welcomed by equity analysts at Exane-BNP/Paribas, who said that this could mean the launch costs for a satellite operator falling from today’s […]
Rocket launch company SpaceX says it will launch 18 missions this year, and that in 2017 there will be more. Speaking at the Satellite 2016 convention in Washington, the company’s president Gwynne Shotwell, said that next year’s manifest could absorb around 24 launches, and perhaps far more. She also spoke enthusiastically about dramatically trimming SpaceX’s […]
Reports out of the Satellite 2016 event in Washington DC suggest that satellite giant Intelsat is close to signing what is being described as a “pioneering” contract for an in-orbit ‘Space Tug’. The plans will see Intelsat link with Orbital ATK. They are not yet confirmed but the last time Intelsat looked at this they […]
Gogo is the snappily-named service which delivers Internet and broadband bandwidth to aircraft passengers for entertainment and e-mail and web-browsing. Gogo used the Satellite 2016 show in Washington DC to announce it had ordered up access to a potentially massive 10 Tb/s of capacity from Intelsat, and in doing so becomes the ‘anchor’ tenant for […]
The opening day (March 7th) of the annual Satellite 2016 conference and exhibition in Washington DC will have plenty of topics to cover. High amongst them will be a provocative 30-page report from equity analysts at Deutsche Bank was issued late in the evening of March 4th. The report doesn’t make good reading for Paris-based […]
Anne Schelle is MD of the Pearl TV partnership, a grouping of more than 200 TV broadcasters, many of them affiliated to the major networks in the US, is focused on exploring “innovative ways of developing digital media” for the industry. She believes that the US’s current ATSC 1.0 digital TV system, almost 20 years […]
Satellite operator Intelsat had a marginally better day on the NYSE market on February 29th and its share price rose 3 cents (to $1.72), but the overwhelming sentiment remains downbeat. Perhaps the most dramatic move is from credit ratings agency Moody’s, which downgraded Intelsat with comments saying that the company’s debt structure has become “unsustainable”. […]