Russia is establishing a new TV channel for the Ukraine and Turkey, ‘Millet’ (“Nation”) will go on air in November. Initially, it will broadcast a 24-hour analogue terrestrial service but then go “international” on satellite. Zaur Smirnov, the head of the Crimea government’s committee for nationalities and deportees, as reported by BBC Monitoring and Russian […]

Tensions between the ‘West’ and Iran are easing, with the Iranian government seemingly ready to do business now that the tough economic restrictions on Iran are re-opening the country for trade. But any opening up does not – seemingly – include the BBC’s local transmissions to the country. On August 20th it was reported that […]

The clock is running out again for Dish Network viewers to the 150 or so stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting. Last weekend, an August 15th deadline for discussions between Dish and Sinclair expired, but the two agreed to an extension for to permit negotiations to continue.  However, prospects do not look good. Baton Rouge’s WBRZ, […]

The English language is a beautiful thing and it is the lingua franca of this industry, and every other. I, for one, am unsurprisingly grateful for that. Because we’re in a relatively new industry a number of terms have been introduced that didn’t really exist before; digital, streaming, downloading, online, etc, and many other languages […]

Former vice-president Al Gore is suing Al Jazeera Americas (AJA) over what he alleges are missing payments in AJA’s purchase of Current TV where he was a director. When Current TV was sold to AJA the merger agreement provided for $75 million of the sale’s proceeds to be held in an escrow account for a […]

Cisco is in the process of releasing ‘Thor’, not a new ‘super-hero’ or even a new satellite from Telenor, but what will eventually be a new codec. ‘Thor’ is intended to be a complete replacement for the cluster of complex patents covering the improved compression offered by HEVC and MPEG-LA and HEVC-Advance solutions, which Cisco […]

The European Space Agency (ESA) last week successfully beamed 100 laser-based signals between two orbiting satellites. The success opens up the possibility of the technology being added to ‘conventional’ DTH orbiting satellites. The signals were beamed from an experimental low-orbiting Sentinel-1A satellite to AlphaSat, operating in geostationary orbit, and with 48,000 kms between the two […]

Business is about the numbers, right? Sentiment has no place in business, right? Wrong. Business floats, or sinks, on a whole sea of sentiment. A very slight change in numbers at one or two companies can change the weather in that sea. That means a whole sector can get caught up in a storm whether […]

The BBC’s licence fee will be under severe pressure come 2020/2021, according to an analysis of the UK government’s ‘Green Paper’ proposals for funding the public broadcaster. Enders Analysis’s Toby Syfret and Gill Hind, in a report published August 1 by the ‘Our Beeb’ website and which originated as a study by Enders, are blunt […]

Stephen Spengler, Intelsat’s CEO, could have started his half-yearly (Q2) results presentation by using a biblical quote, saying “O Ye of Little Faith” as if to chastise those shareholders who did not maintain loyalty towards the company. Within moments of the results being declared, Intelsat’s share price had bounced a massive – and probably record-breaking […]