Global alternative asset manager The Carlyle Group has reached an agreement to acquire an 85 per cent share of Spanish triple-play cable operator Telecable de Asturias. Liberbank will retain a minority stake after the transaction, which is expected to close by year-end. The transaction values the company at €400 million; equity for this investment will […]

BT and TalkTalk have won permission to appeal against a High Court ruling that had backed the provisions of the government’s Digital Economy Act which expects ISPs to police piracy. The Digital Economy Act had been the subject of ongoing legal challenges since it was rushed through Parliament just before the general election. Under the […]

Members of a broad coalition of industry and labour groups have stepped up their campaign to rally support for legislation that would give them new tools to crack down on foreign websites engaged in piracy and counterfeiting by lobbying the US House of Representatives en masse. Some 40 representatives of the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and […]

Mexico’s Maxcom Telecomunicaciones is set to launch an online video and live television rental service using a technology that allows streaming with a very low broadband speed. The telco already offers phone and Internet services in Mexico, where it has around 100,000 broadband users, The service will pitch it into competition with Netflix’s recently-launched operation […]

On Wednesday, Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary, is expected to pile on the pressure to ISPs to block pirate sites. He will exhort them to make ‘life more difficult’ for online pirates telling an audience of media executives that internet companies, advertisers and credit card firms should do more to clamp down on alleged rogue websites. […]

Australian broadband company Internode has become the first company to deliver the fetchtv IP TV service over Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), showing it in action at a house in the western Sydney suburb of Bunya. Although the multicast service designed to provide IPTV is not scheduled for release on the NBN until mid-2012, Internode […]

KPN, Dutch incumbent telco, is launching a multi-screen version of its IPTV service Interactieve TV. Interactieve TV Online, will deliver 20 channels and interactive services to subscribers via laptops or tablets and will be available to all 416,000 subscribers of the IPTV service. As well as the Dutch public broadcast services, channels from RTL and […]

It was a question from an analyst that prompted a rare note of indignation from BSkyB’s normally calm and collected CEO Jeremy Darroch. Asked whether BSkyB would continue to monitor the make-up of its board of directors, Darroch said it was quite ludicrous to suggest that News Corp was not a entity to hold a […]

Hollywood film studios can claim a significant win in their ongoing fight against online piracy, after the UK High Court ruled that dominant telco and leading ISP BT must block access to an illegal file-sharing website. BT users will no longer be able to download illegally films and TV shows for free from Newzbin2. The […]

Irish telco eircom has announced Phase 1 of a plan to upgrade significantly Ireland’s telecommunications infrastructure by rolling out fibre-based access technologies delivering superfast broadband to customers. Separately, the company also announced it will launch television services in 2012. The company intends to serve 100,000 premises by summer 2012 in Phase 1 of a planned […]