CHANNEL 4 held merger talks with telecoms group BT after it launched its IPTV service, it has emerged. The broadcaster's chairman, Luke Johnson, met Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT, on more than one occasion last year to discuss a tie-up. "They have obviously got a pipe into every home in the country, they have […]

Wall-to-wall coverage of the US presidential election in helped CNN shatter ratings records last year. CNN's election night coverage attracted more than 13 million viewers, beating broadcast networks and cable rivals, and courting younger viewers with gimmicks such as holograms of its correspondents. In spite of this, the network ended the year as it has […]

Postponing the Feb. 17 date for broadcasters to turn off their analogue signals will create more problems than it solves, said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Martin said the shortage in funding for digital converter boxes was a problem that needed to be fixed quickly, and said he […]

The BBC director-general BBC has called on the UK government to help his commercial rivals survive the economic slowdown, so that "their content might help inspire the population to adopt high-speed broadband technologies." Writing for the FT, Mark Thompson has supported a merger of Channel 4 and Five, a course thought to be favoured by […]

US broadcaster CBS has raised the stakes in the online video market with a revamp of its video site. CBS has added content from partners including Sony, Endemol, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor and PBS, to TV.com, the site it acquired in the $1.8 billion takeover last year of CNET Networks, the technology web site operator. The partners will […]

Babelgum has called for the scrapping of the BBC/C4/ITV JV Kangaroo declaring any other option would breach Competition Commission rules. In its written response to the Commission's suggested remedies to keep the JV legal, Babelgum says only one of the proposed options – banning the project – is realistic. Last month Kangaroo made its compromise […]

Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental chain, is open to collaboration with telecom companies such as Verizon and AT&T as it expands into the video-on-demand business, chief executive officer Jim Keyes said. “As we move toward video-on-demand and pay-per-view, Blockbuster is well positioned not only to compete on our own, but also to partner with […]

The BBC announced that iPlayer has delivered record end of year figures. December 2008 saw 41million requests to view BBC TV programmes via BBC iPlayer, the biggest month since launch in December 2007. This compared to just over 35 million requests in November 2008. The total number of requests for the year now stands at […]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, taking over from Bill Gates in his first CES keynote, said one of the biggest areas of opportunity for the consumer-electronics industry — even given the current economic recession — is to converge the capabilities of PCs, phones and TVs. "In the future you will be able to connect to information […]

David Del Valle in Madrid A Spanish Court in the North of the Country has sentenced a hotelier to six months in jail and to pay E20,000 for pirating Sogecable-controlled pay-TV platform Digital Plus. It is the first jail conviction in the country, but, possibly not the last one as there are 15 legal proceedings […]