The BBC will return nearly half the £600 million (€734m) fund it was given to help the elderly and disabled convert from analogue to digital TV after the switch proved more straightforward than many people had feared. A total of £603 million was allocated out of licence fee revenues to help the over-75s, the blind […]
French media and entertainment technology specialist Technicolor hopes to find a partner for its loss-making set-top box business this year and is in talks with several parties, its chief executive Frederic Rose told Reuters. The company is also seeking to dispose of its French set-top box (STB) factory – where a planned production shutdown threatens […]
Indian telco and broadcasting giant Reliance is promising another US$200 million in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks studio. Reliance invested $325 million back in 2009. The cash helped finance movies such as War Horse and The Help, both of which were critically well received, but failed to dominate the box office. The new cash injection permits DreamWorks […]
Senior DirecTV executives, meeting with Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, say they expect to invest $32 million into the country about one third of which will go into the manufacturing of locally-produced set-top boxes. The balance will go into building a new broadcast centre at San Isidro, to the north of Buenos Aires. The […]
Chinese state-owned StarTimes Communication Network Technology is set to invest in Sierra Leone, according to a report carried by the BBC’s Monitoring Service. This was made known to officials from the Sierra Leone embassy in China by StarTimes Vice-President Charles Liu, during an official visit to the headquarters of StarTimes at Jianguo Road, Chaoyang District. […]
Dutch cable television firm Ziggo plans to list on the Amsterdam stock exchange, but a date has not yet been set. Ziggo, currently owned by private equity firms, is the biggest cable television firm in Holland with some three million subscribers. It was formed between 2005 and 2007 through the merger of Casema, Multikabel and […]
US start-up Aereo (formerly Bamboom Labs) has broken cover with its Internet-based, $12/month subscription television service, allowing consumers to view live or recorded local TV over the Internet on their HDTV, iPad, iPhone, tablet, Mac, PC, or with Internet TV solutions such as AppleTV and Roku. Aereo’s members will have access to all of the […]
India is welcoming foreign investment in its digital cable TV sector, and has set a Foreign Direct Investment cap of 74 per cent for non-Indian investors. The new limit applies to DTH, IPTV, mobile TV, and digital cable distribution. The newly set cap replaces a number of other assorted investment limits within the TV sector. […]
Sky Deutschland has raised €155.8 million in a share sale to load up for the auction for key rights to top-flight soccer, its main draw for subscribers. The company placed about 70.8 million new shares at €2.20 each, with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp taking up about half of the new shares to keep its stake […]
The owners of German cable company Primacom have been forced to inject another €20 million into the business and restructure its €300 million of debt for the second time in a year. Primacom was taken over in January 2011 by its bank lenders including ING and fund managers Alcentra Group, Tennenbaum Capital and Avenue Capital […]