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 […]

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 […]

The beleaguered pay-TV sports operation has appointed ex Emap CEO Robin Miller as its new chairman as it seeks new financing after losing a tranche of Premier League matches. It badly needs to raise £100m (E113m) of new investment and will seek to have investors back a new business plan concentrating on its position in […]

French pay TV group Canal Plus has announced the launch of the new ‘Canal Ready’ label to be placed on new TV equipment. The label is intended to inform consumers about the compatibility of the product they are about to buy with the group’s services. Canal Ready will feature on satellite and DTT set-top boxes […]

Screen Digest forecasts that the global pay TV set-top box (STB) market will peak within the next four years, reaching annual shipments of 127 million units in 2012, before the market declines in 2013. The continuing thrust by pay TV operators to convert their customers from analogue to digital and upgrade them to high definition […]