Lloyds TSB is providing £10.5 million (E11.5m) in debt funding to European DVD and games rental service Lovefilm, designed to repay existing debt and invest in VOD technology. Amazon is Lovefilm's largest shareholder after putting its European and German DVD rental ops in to the business last year. Lovefilm announced record sign-ups over the Christmas […]

Fetch TV, the IPTV platform from IP Vision, has signed content deals with the National Geographic and Baby TV to create branded environments within its EPG listings. The deals, which are the first since Fetch TV launched last November, will see users directed through to fully branded pages that include VoD content when selecting either […]

Virgin Media is bringing sport on demand to its 3.5 million TV customers. The immediate launch of Setanta Replay on Virgin Media offers a range of football content, including Barclays Premier League games, FA Cup matches, England home friendlies and World Cup qualifiers. Setanta Replay on Virgin Media will offer top sporting fixtures on demand […]

Babelgum has called for the scrapping of the BBC/C4/ITV JV Kangaroo declaring any other option would breach Competition Commission rules. In its written response to the Commission's suggested remedies to keep the JV legal, Babelgum says only one of the proposed options – banning the project – is realistic. Last month Kangaroo made its compromise […]

Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental chain, is open to collaboration with telecom companies such as Verizon and AT&T as it expands into the video-on-demand business, chief executive officer Jim Keyes said. “As we move toward video-on-demand and pay-per-view, Blockbuster is well positioned not only to compete on our own, but also to partner with […]

The BBC announced that iPlayer has delivered record end of year figures. December 2008 saw 41million requests to view BBC TV programmes via BBC iPlayer, the biggest month since launch in December 2007. This compared to just over 35 million requests in November 2008. The total number of requests for the year now stands at […]

UK cable operator Virgin Media has secured a deal with ITV to show some of the broadcaster’s programming through its on-demand service. ITV will make 40 hours of its programming from channels ITV 1, 2, 3 and 4 available each week. Programmes will be available for seven days after they are broadcast. Some 500 hours […]

Over 80 copyright holders including video portal Joy.cn, film distributor PolyBona Film, and record label Orange Sky Entertainment have formed an anti-piracy alliance, and are suing China's largest video-sharing site Tudou. In May 2008, Joy.cn filed suit against Tudou for unauthorised use of its video content, which Tudou resolved in November with an out-of-court settlement […]

Netflix and LG Electronics will soon introduce TV sets that can screen Netflix movies directly from the Web without an external box. Netflix, which is seeking to equip all home-entertainment screens with instant movie-viewing capability, also announced other partnerships, including one with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 to embed the movie software in its game consoles. Netflix […]

Video search engine blinkx has unveiled an Enhanced Metadata Enrichment solution for publishers, as part of the blinkx Advanced Media Platform. Based on patent-protected technology, the blinkx Advanced Media Platform enables media publishers and aggregators to manage and monetise video content to its greatest potential. “An Enhanced Metadata Enrichment solution does more than just help […]