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Norway’s TV2 adds 3D football

TV2, Norway’s largest commercial broadcaster, on October 11th supplied Norway’s first-ever live national 3D transmission. The 3D broadcast was of the Norway vs Cyprus UEFA football international to Canal Digital’s pay-TV operation. The game, from Norway’s national football stadium Ullevaal in Oslo saw the home team win 3-1. TV2 used a T-VIPS JPEG2000 Gateway unit […]

October 12, 2011By Chris Forrester

FOX and FA extend rights to 2017-18 season

FOX Soccer has renewed exclusive media rights with The Football Association (FA), the governing body of football in England, for six more years through the 2017-18 soccer season. The multi-platform deal grants FOX exclusive rights to all FA content in all languages for the US and Caribbean territories, including the FA Cup tournament, England’s national […]

October 12, 2011

Sainsbury’s buys Media Vault

Sainsbury’s is spending £1 million (€1.15m) to buy Global Media Vault, a white-label digital entertainment distribution vendor, to power its launch in to online content retailing. The UK supermarket says the acquisition will be used to add digital content to Sainsbury’s Entertainment, the site it launched in November 2010 to sell CDs, DVDs and books. […]

October 11, 2011

Reliance set to strike deal with UTV

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 […]

October 10, 2011

The Simpsons are saved

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 […]

October 10, 2011

PBS UK launching November 1st

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 […]

October 10, 2011By Chris Forrester

New text-only Russian news channel

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 […]

October 10, 2011By Chris Forrester

Outdoor Channel for Portugal

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 […]

October 10, 2011

ESPN HD reaches 2m European homes

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 […]

October 7, 2011

Deutsche Telekom adds IPTV channels

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 […]

October 7, 2011