“Triple play” for rocket launch company Arianespace means having three sizes of rockets available to it, and thus enabling the company to launch any size of cargoes from smaller, Earth-observation satellites right up to heavyweight 20-tonne missions to the International Space Station.  The smaller rockets take the shape of its Soyuz and Vega rocket systems, […]

Last week, hard drive manufacturer Western Digital said its Thailand production lines were beginning to return to normal. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the floods severely impacted October’s supply chain of many other classes of consumer electronics items. “As flood waters progressively travelled from the northern region southwards and inundated Central […]

Power without responsibility is an accusation traditionally levelled at the British Press: it makes and breaks governments and destroys innocent people’s lives without fear of the consequences. Some argue this is the price you pay for a free press. Certainly the press in the UK is relatively economically robust compared to other European countries and […]

Eutelsat has long struggled with the somewhat complicated names given to its fleet. From March 1 next year, it will adopt a new naming system whereby the satellite’s orbit location determines the name of the craft. Out will go the confusing Eurobird, Atlantic Bird, Sesat and W-series names. For example, its Atlantic Bird 2 satellite, […]

BBC Monitoring is reporting that China imposed restrictions on all of its provincial satellite TV channels about a month ago.  “Authorities could now be gearing up to announce another measure aimed at tightening their grip on the mass media – a ban on all ads during TV dramas on all stations, including state-owned CCTV,” says […]

Korean electronics giant LG recently carried out a comparison test of its passive 3DTV technology with that of its 3D rivals’ ‘Active Shutter’ methods. LG used 4,000 ordinary Australian shoppers in a number of Westfield shopping malls to compare and contrast the technologies, and their ‘votes’ massively favoured LG’s Cinema 3DTV system over that of […]

The Eurozone crisis continues in full swing and its seemingly inexorable unfolding proves you should never say “at least it can’t get any worse.” Blame for the mess points in two opposite directions – depending on where you stand. Either the Eurozone was never going to work, and to try it at all was to […]

Inmarsat had three catastrophic days last week if investor sentiment is any guide. Inmarsat, which supplies satellite-based services and communications mainly to the maritime and aircraft industries, was within the past year trading at a buoyant 724p per share. Last Monday (November 14) its price stood at 470p, already massively depressed. But from Wednesday to […]

The economic downturn has led an influential working group to advise Portugal’s government that the number of publicly financed TV and radio channels should be dramatically cut back. The suggestion is that RTP (Portugal’s public broadcaster) should transmit just one general interest channel and no longer carry advertising.  Its “international” channel should be managed by […]

Loral Space & Communications says it may be buying back up to 800,000 of its own NASDAQ shares for cancellation. There’s no set timetable for the purchase, and the buy-back will depend on the market price and availability of stock. Loral has 21.2 million voting common shares outstanding and 9.5 million non-voting shares outstanding as […]