With judgement set to be made on the legality of RealNetworks' DVD copying software, RealNetworks has filed a new charge against the Hollywood studios, alleging they violated antitrust law by banding together to fight the video-copying software. Real filed its amended complaint in a federal court in San Francisco. It claims that the six major […]
Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger (SdK), a German shareholders interest group has taken the former CEOs of German pay-TV platform Premiere to court over allegations of investment fraud and insider trading. SdK has brought a case against former CEOs Georg Kofler and Michael Börnicke in a Munich court, claiming the pair falsified subscriber numbers on two occasions. […]
From David Del Valle in Madrid Spain's Telefonica has seen a 25 per cent increase in the number of its pay-TV clients around the world reaching a total of 2.3 million by the end of the first quarter of the year. Out of them 604,819 are in Spain to its IPTV service Imagenio, up 9.2 […]
Universal and Warner Bros are to sue the German online video portal Zattoo for adding commercial over their movies. Zattoo offers live streams of the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, which include the showing of movie titles from the two Hollywood studios. However, since the streams are available at no cost, the business model includes […]
From Branislav Pekic in Rome Italian consultancy e-Media Institute has published a list of the top 10 pay-TV operators via satellite, which sees BSkyB on top with 9.2 million subscribers in the UK and Ireland, 34% of all TV households. Canal Plus France is second with 5.3 million, followed by Sky Italia with 4.7 million […]
During the first three months of 2009 the “Chaînes Canal+” package commanded a 4.5 per cent share of French viewers, a 0.2-point increase from first-quarter 2008 that it says reflects the popularity of Canal+ Family and Canal+ Sport. The number of unique visitors to the new canalplus.fr website doubled to 2,354,000 in February, representing a […]
Germany's Premiere increased first quarter losses of E80 million, against E28.1m in Q1 2008. It lost 28,000 subscribers on the quarter, for a total of 2,371,000. ARPU was up E1 at E23.86m. The churn rate was steady but at a high 22.4%. The company said it expects to reverse its decline in subscriber numbers in […]
Setanta has revealed that subscriber growth has increased the size of the audiences it is attracting for football games broadcast this season. The average audience for Barclays Premier League games shown live on Setanta this year is up by 36.3 per cent on the previous season. The biggest games – such as January's derby between […]
German pay-TV station Premiere will change its brand name to Sky despite heavy write-downs on the Premiere brand name. Premiere will trade under the Sky name as do other pay-TV stations partly or fully owned by News Corp. News Corp. has a 30.5 per cent stake in Premiere, and it fully owns Sky Italia and […]
From David Del Valle in Madrid Pay-TV group Sogecable is facing a new shake-out following the resignation of its CEO Javier Diez de Polanco, soon after Prisa, parent company of Sogecable, re-organised the management team of the TV division. Bad financial results and the failed sale of DTH platform Digital Plus, burdened with debts, are […]