ASSOCHAM (The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India) has urged Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to withdraw five per cent Customs Duty on STBs in Budget proposals for 2010-11 to provide support to the DTH industry. Customs Duty on STBs had been exempted in 2006 to provide impetus to industries involved in digitisation […]

BSkyB has won a five-year legal action against Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for deceit, negligent misrepresentation and breach of contract. The UK Courts found that EDS had lied to Sky in order to secure a contract as part of the company's investment in a new customer relationship management system. In summer 2000, Sky appointed EDS […]

Roku, the television set-top box maker spun off by Netflix, is planning to raise $30 million in private funding this quarter and may sell shares to the public next year, Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood said. The company, which lets customers stream movies from Netflix and Amazon.com on their TVs, along with music from Pandora […]

Central European Media Enterprises (CME) is in the final stage of acquiring News Corp’s Bulgarian broadcaster bTV for about E500 million, according to reports. The deal is expected to be completed towards the end of February.

Red Bee Media has appointed Brian Levy as Director and Chief Technology Officer reporting directly to CEO Bill Patrizio. Patrizio said: “Brian's extensive experience across both the media and IT sectors will be instrumental to Red Bee Media's growth as we continue to connect viewers with the content they want to watch on whatever platform […]

Responding to civil liberties concerns, the European Commission has said it will “closely monitor” a planned UK trial of deep packet inspection technology by Virgin Media. In November Virgin announced plans to look at the traffic of 40 per cent, or 1.6 million, of its subscribers, to gauge the level of illegal file-sharing on its […]

The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the acquisition of the German cable network operator Unitymedia by Liberty Global. The Commission concluded that the concentration would not significantly impede effective competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) or any substantial part of it.

Verizon’s FiOS ended 2009 with a comparatively sluggish quarter, adding 153,000 subscribers for both TV and Internet services. Verizon had 2.9 million FiOS TV customers as of the end of 2009, and 3.4 million FiOS Internet customers. Year to year, Verizon boosted FiOS TV subs by 49 per cent (with a 24.5 per cent penetration […]

The German state media office will decide by mid-March if mobile TV via the DVB-H standard gets a second chance. An important requirement for a possible re-tender of a 10-year licence is that interested parties confirm their interest in deploying DVB-H to the approval and oversight commission of the media offices (ZAK) before the end […]

The Federal Communications Commission has voted to stop cable operators from withholding local sports channels from rivals in the US, potentially giving consumers more choice of pay-TV providers. Federal law requires cable operators to offer access to channels they partially or wholly own to rivals at reasonable rates. But the law includes a loophole that […]