Arabsat has contracted with an Astrium/Thales Alenia consortium to build its latest satellite, the first of its ‘6th Generation’ series. BADR-7 is being built jointly by Astrium, which will supply its Eurostar E3000 platform for the project, and Thales Alenia which will design and build the communications payload. Arianespace will launch the craft. The contract […]
An overly generous Santa Claus left a very nice gift for me under the tree this year, a shiny new Apple iPad Mini with both WiFi and 4G access. Considering I already own a first generation full size iPad, an iTouch, two Apple iPhone 4s, the latest Apple MacBookPro, a MacMini, a MacPro tower and […]
Last week one firm of investment bankers advised clients to “Sell” their Eutelsat stock. This week a different set of advice comes from Morgan Stanley which highlights Eutelsat as one of its Top 5 media stock picks of the year, despite being a poor overall performer during 2012, and at one stage last year revising […]
Telenor’s Thor II has been retired and placed in a graveyard orbit about 350 kms higher than the normal geostationary operational height in a six-day operation which wrapped on January 10th. Thor II was launched on a Delta 11 rocket from Cape Canaveral in May 1997. It was the first satellite actually procured by Telenor […]
On January 8th, Eutelsat launched a demo Ultra-HDTV channel – the first full-time such channel anywhere on the planet. This step is but the first in what Berenberg Bank says represents a growing momentum building in Ultra-HDTV. “2012 was the year when we first heard noise about Super Hi-Vision or Ultra HDTV (UHDTV), the new […]
In a sign that pay-radio is now considered mainstream entertainment as far as North American vehicles are concerned, Toyota has mandated that Sirius-equipped units are now fitted to their entire 2013 range of cars, from ‘basic’ models to up-market models. SiriusXM will also be standard on all vehicles equipped with Toyota’s popular Entune in-car […]
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 […]