The STB business of Motorola has gone to Arris as they beat out Pace and others with a winning $2.35 billion bid. Arris is one of those billion dollar (in fact currently about $1.75 billion market cap) that no one not in its sector has ever heard of. They are so low profile the deal […]
It has been a weekend of frenzied activity as Discovery Communications mopped up the SBS broadcasting segment of ProSiebenSat.1 and took a useful slice out of TF1, and meanwhile Liberty Global pitched its offer for Benelux cable MSO Telenet. Full marks to Discovery for further extending its interests outside its pure ‘factual’ entertainment reputation. Indeed, […]
There have been three failures in the past 16 months of the Proton rocket when fitted with the Briz-M upper stage booster, needed to loft satellites into geostationary orbit. A review board is currently engaged into funding out what went wrong with a December 9th failure which did not correctly orbit its hugely valuable cargo. […]
Being a shareholder in Pace has sometimes been profitable – but mostly not – and it has rarely been dull. Now the Yorkshire-based STB maker is bidding for the Motorola STB business that Google would like to offload following its buy of the mobile business. For a company that was earlier this year on its […]
This past weekend’s ILS/Proton rocket launch problems have placed Satmex, the next planned launch client, into an extremely dangerous position. Russia’s Proton Briz-M upper stage failed to reach its intended orbit, and placed its satellite into a lower orbit than intended. All planned further launches will now be subject to further delays. This will severely […]
Eutelsat’s massive 70B craft was successfully orbited from the floating Sea Launch platform overnight on December 3-4. The launch took place at 20.44 GMT on the 3rd. The huge 5.2 tonne satellite is to be placed at 70.5 degrees East. Eutelsat, in a statement, said the craft’s solar panels had been partly deployed some two […]
So, an academic study has suggested that the closure of Megaupload may have harmed legitimate box office takings for some movies. To some this kind of declaration is the media equivalent of being a climate change ‘denier’. I have said here before that the phalanx of content rights representation bodies – there are many of […]
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 […]