British Sky Broadcasting Group has successfully priced £3.25 billion (equivalent) of Euro and US dollar denominated bonds. Proceeds from the bonds will be available to finance the acquisition of 100 per cent of Sky Italia and 57.4 per cent of Sky Deutschland, which was announced on July 25th 2014. The four tranches of bonds to […]
UK commercial Public Service Broadcaster ITV has called for major pay-TV platforms to pay UK Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) fairly for the transmission of their channels, ending what is effectively a multi-million pound subsidy to Sky and Virgin. The demand for action follows the publication of a report that shows how retransmission payments to broadcasters […]
Vice Media has secured a further $500 million in financing from two more minority investors, in part to fund “thousands of hours” of new video content for online, mobile and TV. The youth digital media brand said that the new investment, $250 million each from Silicon Valley firm Technology Crossover Ventures and US cable broadcaster […]
September 2nd sees the first of BSkyB’s financial roadshow presentations take place with the aim of raising the extra cash it needs to buy Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia. Financial reports suggest that BSkyB is looking to raise $2 billion. Last week BSkyB mandated three banks (Barclays, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley) to lead the […]
PeerTV, the TV OTT technology solutions provider, announced on July 30th that it has successfully agreed new equity facilities of £1.5 million (€1.88m) which will finance the continuing development and sales drive for its latest breed of Android powered quad core set top boxes, which now include market leading H265 High Efficiency Video Coding. The […]
Vadio, the full-scale distribution platform for music video content and ads online, has closed a $2 million seed funding round with backing from music, entertainment and technology investors including Ed Wilson, former President of NBC Enterprises; Robin Richards, former CEO of Vivendi Universal Net USA; Marc Geiger, Co-Founder of Lollapalooza and Partner at William Morris […]
bitmovin, a technology specilaist in adaptive streaming solutions, has received a 7-digit investment from Austrian/US venture fund SpeedInvest and institutional investor Constantia Industries to accelerate development and deployment of its high performance cloud-based encoding platform bitcodin and its efficient bitdash streaming clients for MPEG-DASH. bitmovin is an Austrian start-up that develops and sells high-performance media […]
A US-based private equity firm has bid $3.2 billion to buy OSN (the former Orbit-Showtime Network). The news emerged from 60.5 per cent owner KIPCO (the Kuwait Investment Projects Co) which reported the bid in a filing to the Kwait bourse on August 10th. Saudi Arabia’s Mawarid Group owns the rest of OSN, and both […]
The UK government’s rollout of superfast broadband has now reached more than 1 million homes and businesses across the UK. The £1.7 billion nationwide rollout is firmly on track to extend superfast broadband to 95 per cent of UK homes and businesses by 2017. The rate at which the fibre technology is being rolled out […]
Cloud video specialist Vidmind has capitalised on the investment of $30 million from Russian retail group Trellas, by going live through digital TV platform TVzor. TVzor is using the Vidmind cloud-based, hybrid OTT/DTT platform as the foundation for a new ‘primary’ TV service in Russia. Trellas says it is also committed to a follow-on investment […]