Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest man, is set to sign a deal with Walt Disney’s Indian subsidiary that will provide his Reliance Industries with the content for its next generation of mobile telecoms. The deal, expected to be sealed in the coming weeks, is between Reliance and UTV, one of Bollywood’s largest entertainment groups, which Disney […]
The Simpsons has been saved from the axe at the 11th hour. The cast have agreed to take a pay cut, meaning the show will go on being made until at least 2014. James L Brooks, the show’s executive producer, wrote on Twitter that he was “crying animated tears of joy”. The Simpsons has seen […]
The USA’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is to launch on Nov 1 (on BSkyB and Virgin Media), with a portfolio of high-quality US-produced factual, arts and current affairs programming. PBS-UK is a j-v between PBS’ Distribution arm and Canadian entrepreneur David Lyons of Quadra Group/Orca Exploration. The channel is being played out by Red Bee […]
The Kommersant publishing house unveiled its new TV channel last week, Kommersant TV, even though it has no conventional TV pictures as such. Instead, the channel shows blocks of text with photo illustrations, rotating in importance. The text shows political and financial news, the weather and so on. “Whether or not this is television makes […]
Outdoor Channel and international broadcaster Chello Zone, a subsidiary of Liberty Global’s international media division Chellomedia, have confirmed the launch of Outdoor Channel HD in Portugal. Premiering on triple-play operator ZON Multimédia, the deal marks Outdoor Channel’s debut in Portugal. ZON Multimedia claims a 60 per cent share of the Portuguese pay TV market and […]
In the past 18 months, ESPN has reached more than a dozen new distribution deals with platform partners in Europe for distribution of HD networks, led by ESPN America HD, bringing HD sports to nearly 2 million homes. With new deals for HD distribution in more than a dozen countries, ESPN America HD has been […]
Deutsche Telekom has added two new channels to its IPTV service ‘T-Home Entertain’. Fox International Channels-owned BabyTV will air 24 hours a day, commercial-free, as part of the Entertain, Kids and BigTV packages, whilst Spiegel TV Wissen will be available in standard definition in the documentary and BigTV packages and in HD as part of […]
Sports fans across Europe can stay ahead of the game thanks to Eurosport’s new mobile score centre for iPhone, available in 9 languages. Providing scores, results and goal alerts from live matches across a range of major team and individual sports, Eurosport claims the free app is one of the most comprehensive results apps in […]
John Cassy, BSkyB’s director of 3D, says that there’s far too much pessimism about 3D for TV, especially on the 3D movie side of the business, but Sky remains firmly committed to investing in more 3D content. Cassy was speaking having come direct from London Zoo where Sky’s latest documentary (‘3D Meercats’, a co-production with […]
Spain’s Telefonica, operator of the IPTV service Imagenio with almost 800,000 subscribers, is entering into the production TV business following its agreement with pubcaster RTVE to develop several entertainment and cultural TV programmes. The deal has already borne fruit with the release of the first TV productions: “Entre dos aguas” a documentary about music, and […]