One might say “at last”. On November 8th French media regulator le Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) licensed Onde Numérique to broadcast by satellite over Europe. Transmissions will be made on the Eutelsat/SES Solaris Mobile payload that’s been in orbit on Eutelsat’s W2A craft since April 2009.  The CSA announced a beauty contest competition for […]

There has been a consensus since the hapless George Entwistle was assisted onto his sword point a couple of weeks ago that the BBC should appoint an outsider as the new DG. All senior insiders were, to some extent or other, either tainted by the events that brought poor George down, or had no editorial […]

Billionaire Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal, is creating a rival to the world’s established rocket-launch systems, France’s Arianespace and Russia’s Proton. His business is SpaceX and its Falcon rockets are proving to be a very real challenge to the status-quo. Musk has told the BBC that the Ariane 5 rocket system has “no chance” in […]

Iran, for some time a pariah nation, is finally suffering the reality of increasingly tough sanctions. In the past few weeks Eutelsat and Intelsat have taken down Iran’s state-backed channels, including those belonging to Press TV, its English-language propaganda station.  Now Hong Kong-based AsiaSat has removed all Iranian TV and radio channels “in line with […]

EU’s foreign policy minister on has denounced Iran’s “deliberate jamming” of TV and radio satellite broadcasts that deprive its citizens of access to free information, and called on Tehran to obey global telecommunications laws.  “Since 2009, repeated waves of jamming have affected the signals of European satellites in the Middle East,” the EU’s Catherine Ashton […]

Larry Gerbrandt in Los Angeles raises the spectre of the unwelcome return of relative valuation Like a bad horror movie franchise, some valuation concepts seem to keep coming back for another sequel in hopes that this time they’ve got it right. I’m talking about the biggest financial sink-hole ever created: ‘relative valuation’. The technique rose […]

France’s telecommunications agency is formally asking the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to take action on persistent satellite jamming by Iran.  France’s National Agency of Frequency Regulation (ANFR) says it is “extremely concerned” about Iranian jamming, and reports suggest that discussions between France and other national bodies are discussing sanctions against Iran. In other news Iran […]

Eutelsat and Intelsat have already taken down Iranian TV transmissions coming from IRIB and Press TV. On November 8th the US government applied sanctions on certain named individuals connected to Iran’s broadcasting efforts, as well as criticising Iran’s deliberate jamming of its neighbour’s satellite transmissions and local Internet censorship policies. The US State Department has […]

Iran’s IRIB state-backed TV channels have been dropped by the Eutelsat and Intelsat organisations. The decision also affected the controversial Press TV signals. Press TV has been proscribed by German and British media regulators. Now, according to communiqués from the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) the channels are being reinstated for satellite viewers from satellites […]

Remember Corporate Raiders? The very name sounds so 90s, doesn’t it? These swashbucklers of the corporate stock markets believed in a kind of financial engineering that, by the lights of the more modern and esoteric techniques of debt packaging and trading, seem both simple and benign. It didn’t always seem that way back  then. The […]