An academic study comparing box office revenues before and after the shutdown of popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com has found that box office revenues of a majority of movies did not increase after the shutdown. The study – Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload: A Tale of the Long Tail? – was undertaken by […]
The European Court of Justice has denied the European Commission’s appeal against the Spanish public broadcaster tax, one month after it approved the same model in France. Telco companies will have to keep on investing 0.7 per cent of their revenues in financing the public broadcaster. This is a boost to RTVE and a setback […]
SoundExchange, a non-profit organisation for collecting digital royalties for music artists has sued Sirius XM Radio for at least $50 million for underpaying on recordings, including ones from before 1972. The lawsuit is filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia and claims from 2007 to 2012, Sirius XM “systematically” underpaid SoundExchange […]
Al Jazeera America (AJAM), launched on August 20th, has filed a lawsuit against pay-TV provider, AT&T, after the US telco giant made a late decision to drop the channel from its U-Verse service citing “contractual disputes”. “Unfortunately, AT&T’s decision to unilaterally delete Al Jazeera America presented us with circumstances that were untenable – an affiliate […]
US trade grouping the Internet Association, the unified voice of the Internet representing the interests of the leading Internet companies including Airbnb, Amazon.com, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Gilt, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Path, Practice Fusion, Rackspace, reddit, Salesforce.com, SurveyMonkey, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, and Zynga, has filed a response to the United States Patent and Trademark […]
While the Internet industry has recommended that the US Patent and Trademark Office US take a broader view of voluntary initiatives to reduce online infringement in its inquiry to such practices, its movie counterpart has said they don’t go far enough. It its comments to the Office, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) suggested […]
A row has broken out between Google and Microsoft over the Windows Phone YouTube app. Google has blocked users from watching videos via the app, saying it violated its terms of service. Google wanted the app be made using HTML5 code language, but Microsoft said it was unable to. Microsoft said the issues were “manufactured” […]
India’s broadcasting minister is recommending that the 12 minutes of advertising per hour rule be relaxed until the end of next year. The rules were due to come into force in October, and have been fought by the industry. The Ministry has reportedly changed its mind because the broadcasting industry says that by September 2014 […]
A higher regional court in Germany has reversed an approval by the country’s cartel office for Liberty Global’s €3.16 billion acquisition of KabelBW, throwing the merger into doubt. The Duesseldorf court ruled that the antitrust regulator will have to look at the case again, to either block it or approve the purchase applying stricter conditions […]
CableLabs, the non-profit research and development consortium for the cable industry, has announced a substantial expansion of its global member base, adding 14 new members in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Building on relationships with existing international members, CableLabs members now serve over one hundred million cable subscribers around the world. As the global market […]