Shares have climbed over five per cent in recent  days as Wall Street gossip suggested that a federal  court could be releasing positive news for TiVo any day now. At this stage any such gossip is just that, but investors would love to see a favourable end to TiVo’s very long-running patent dispute with Charlie […]

The more things change the more they stay the same? Is this the lesson of the last few years and the TV advertising market? For many years now niche channels have tried to deliver specialist audiences that have a higher value to advertisers than a mixed, mass audience. The results have been decidedly mixed. The […]

Arianespace is scheduled to launch two satellites tomorrow from Kourou in French Guiana. YahSat-1A, owned by Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi sovereign investment fund, and Intelsat New Dawn, a satellite owned jointly by Intelsat and an African investment group, make up the rocket’s cargo. YahSat-1A will be positioned at 52.5 degrees East to supply extra DTH […]

Talk-radio “shock-jock” Howard Stern is suing Sirius-XM Satellite Radio over the alleged non-payment of a performance bonus. Stern’s original contract was with XM Radio, a company that was bought out of near-bankruptcy by rival Sirius in July 2008. Stern’s original deal called for him to be paid the then staggering sum of $500m over five […]

When Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down on Feb 11 few would have thought of the ramifications that would impact broadcasting in and out of Egypt. Within hours Egypt’s state-supported television began congratulating the Egyptian people “for their pure great revolution, led by the best of the Egyptian youth”. The next day MENA […]

Intelsat is backing a revolutionary “satellite servicer”, a craft which is little more than an orbiting fuel tank to bring extra life to fading geostationary satellites. MacDonald, Dettwiler & Assoc (MDA) is prime contractor for the concept. MDA, a Canadian company, is best known for its ‘Canadarm’ robotic device used on the Space Shuttle. MDA’s […]

We have a widget on the advanced-television.com news service that calculates the most read story over the last five days. It is clear that if the words connected TV feature in the story it will rank high and if the name Google TV is included it will shoot to the top. This fascination is divided […]

US pay-radio operator Sirius-XM is looking at international opportunities.  Greg Maffei, Liberty Global’s CEO, is confirming what many had suspected for some time, and that Sirius-XM (Liberty controls 40 percent of Sirius-XM) wanted to expand overseas. “One of our goals is to get more international,” he told Credit Suisse’s Global Media & Communications conference. A […]

SES has entered into a “framework understanding” with Sea Launch for possible future launches of SES satellites. SES has to date by and large supported the French Arianespace or Russian Proton launch systems for placing its satellites into orbit. Its one experience with the floating ‘Sea Launch’ platform ended up in total catastrophe when the […]

SES Astra used the giant CeBIT show in Hannover to announce a new broadband product targeting communities across Europe without terrestrial broadband – the so-called ‘white spots’ of the countryside. ASTRA2Connect provides the backbone of this new sub-distribution service which supplies the ‘white spots’ with up to 6 Mbit/s of broadband connectivity but without the […]