Irish sports pay broadcaster Setanta has held a fresh round of talks with private equity firms in a bid to raise up to £100 million (E110m) following the pay-television company's failure to retain both its Premier League football rights packages beyond 2010. In February, Setanta won the auction for only one of the six available […]
Playboy TV’s UK operation has been fined £22,500 (E24,700) by Ofcom for broadcasting what it termed explicit adult content free-to-air. The fine applies to its Playboy One service, which broadcast as an unencrypted, free-to-air channel until September. Seven programmes broadcast between September 2007 and December 2007 were investigated by Ofcom and it concluded that “the […]
Liberty Global's European division has restructured E530 million of its E850 million debt, creating two new tranches that will extend its due date from 2012 by two and three years respectively. As a result, around 95% of UPC Holding's debt will now be due in or after 2013. Mike Fries, Liberty Global's president and CEO, […]
German media giant Bertelsmann has reported that its 2008 net profit dropped by a third to E270 million after it was forced to make recession-related adjustments to the value of some of its investments. Impairment charges of E502 million — the bulk from television unit RTL and its stake in Five in the UK — […]
China Telecom on Tuesday reported a 96 per cent plunge in net profit for 2008 after it booked a Rmb24bn ($3.5bn) impairment charge related to its low-end wireless network, known as Xiaolingtong or "Little Smart". But the Chinese telecoms group said it remained buoyant on this year's performance, adding that it hoped strong demand for […]
Fixed satellite services provider Intelsat has reported revenue of $608.8 million and a net loss of $524.2 million for the three months ended December 31st, 2008. The net loss includes non-cash charges of $326.8 million for orbital location impairments and $186.6 million for a loss on undesignated interest rate swaps. The company also reported EBITDA […]
Gerhard Zeiler CEO of RTL Group said it would allow the government to retain a majority stake in any merger with Channel 4, as he wrote down the value of the UK channel by E337m slashing its value by half. Zeiler stressed he is committed to the UK and said a merger between Five and […]
From David Del Valle in Madrid Spain’s largest cable company ONO has reduced by 87 per cent its losses in 2008 to E26 million and now hopes to end the current year breaking even. ONO’s EBITDA was E703 million, up 10.6 per cent. Total revenues were 0.8 per cent down to E1.603 billion, with residential […]
SeaChange International, provider of software and hardware services that support video-on-demand television, reported that fourth-quarter revenues rose 13 per cent to $54 million. Fourth-quarter net income was $4.8 million, down from $12 million in the comparable quarter a year ago; the year-ago quarter included a one-time $10 million gain, the company said. "Despite the challenging […]
Belgium's dominant telco Belgacom TV has reported growth in 2008 exceeded that of the previous year, with the company adding 201,000 new subscribers. Growth peaked in the fourth quarter of the year, with the company adding 63,000 IPTV subscribers in the three-month period. By the end of 2008, the company had a 30 per cent […]