Satellite News

Italy’s Mediaset will continue to invest in pay-TV as part of a two-pronged strategy which has free TV as the “core” business but pay-TV as a strategic asset for the future.

Mediaset Premium, the company’s pay-DTT offering, saw revenues rise 79% in 2008, to reach €404 million. During the year, the number of active cards rose from 2.1 million to 2.8 million, rising further to reach 3.225 million by mid-March.

New deals have been signed for soccer rights, with the Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) due to join the platform as well as new motor racing, including Grand Prix, coverage. Mediaset also plans an expansion of Premium’s pay-per-view movie offering to help it compete against News Corp’s Sky Italia. To date, over €1.7 billion has been invested in Mediaset’s digital-terrestrial service.

Breakeven for the pay-TV platform is set for 2010, with average revenue per user (ARPU) forecast to rise to €100 by that year. ARPU was up in 2008 to €80 from 2007’s €60.

Overall, Mediaset saw group profit fall 9.4% to €459 million on revenues up a meagre 4.2% to €4.251 billion.

© Rapid TV News 2009

[Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...]Factual broadcaster Discovery Communications has accused Amazon of infringing patents Discovery holds on electronic book technology. The lawsuit claims that the original Kindle, as well as version 2 released in late February, infringes on technology developed by Discovery founder John S. Hendricks, who with two others, received a patent for the invention on November 20 2007.

The technology provides a "secure, encrypted system for the selection, transmission, and sale of electronic books," says Discovery. The company says it, and John Hendricks were significant players in the development of digital content and delivery services in the 1990s. Hendricks' work included inventions of a secure, encrypted system for the selection, transmission, and sale of electronic books. Fellow patent-holders are Michael Asmussen and John McCoskey.

Joseph A. LaSala, Jr., General Counsel of Discovery Communications, said: "The Kindle and Kindle 2 are important and popular content delivery systems. We believe they infringe our intellectual property rights, and that we are entitled to fair compensation. Legal action is not something Discovery takes lightly. Our tradition as an inventive company has produced considerable intellectual property assets for our shareholders, and today's infringement litigation is part of our effort to protect and defend those assets."

Hendricks’ patent (No. 7,298,851) is owned by Discovery, and the broadcaster is asking the US District Court in Delaware for a jury trial.

The technology behind the 55-page patent seems comprehensive, right down to an EPG offering options such as “books you can order” and the supplying assorted themes (History, Romance, Business, etc) as well as listing “Books in your library” with “next shelf” and “previous shelf” options.

Discovery says it does not want Amazon to stop selling the Kindle, but is seeking damages, legal fees and an ongoing licensing deal.

© Rapid TV News 2009

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Cologne-based public broadcaster WDR has started test transmissions on the Eins Festival HD transponder on Astra at 19.2 degrees East.
The Westdeutscher Rundfunk had earlier said it would launch test transmissions in order to prepare for regular broadcasts. For the past year the Eins Festival HD transponder has been used for special HD showcase presentations first during the IFA exposition in Berlin and last Christmas.
At the moment, the German language HD offer on Astra is limited to the free-to-air channels Luxe.tv HD and Annixe HD and the two premium channels Discovery HD and Premiere HD. In the past few days there has been some speculation that ProSiebenSat.1 would resume HD broadcasts and that RTL is also contemplating launching HD; but so far there has been no official word from either of the broadcasters.

The Czech and Slovak pre-pay DTH platform Sky Link is to boost its HD offer.
Digizone reports, quoting unconfirmed sources, that it will introduce Discovery HD, FilmBox HD and History Channel HD on April 1, with testing likely to start a few days earlier.
It already offers Brava HD and Eurosport HD in both countries, along with Nova HD in the Czech Republic.
Sky Link claims a combined total of more than 500,000 customers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Tough times for RCS/RDS


By Chris Dziadul | March 19, 2009 | 08:10 UK

Problems appear to be mounting at RCS/RDS, the operator of both Romania’s largest cable network and DTH platform.

ZF reports that a number of leading executives have left the company in recent months, some of them to work at rival companies such as UPC and Romtelecom.

These have recently restructured their businesses and now pose far greater threats to RCS/RDS than previously.

The latest person to leave RCS/RDS is Ovidiu Ghiman, one of the 15 most important people in the company, who has joined Romtelecom.

RCS/RDS has also just suffered a blow in neighbouring Hungary, where it was competing for the fourth mobile licence, the tender for which has been cancelled.

Owing to the current judicial procedures launched by Canal+ Group and competing telcos, France Télécom’s commercial brand Orange announced that it could suspend the sale of its new channel Orange Sport.

This option follows the decision in February of the Paris Court of Commerce asking France Télécom to stop tying the subscription of Orange Sport to the sale of a triple-play offer before March 24. The action was initiated by competitors Free and SFR.
Orange has appealed the judgement but needs to make a choice before next Tuesday, March 24.

Two other options are being studied by Orange : to pay the €50,000 daily fee or broadcast Orange Sport via satellite.

Should the company decide to expand distribution, while Orange may lose out in terms of exclusivity, it could sign up more subs to the channel, which as with all sports channels, is expensive to run.

© Rapid TV News 2009

Global satellite provider Intelsat reported an impressive set of revenue numbers for its Q4 and full-year (to Dec 31 2008) results.

Intelsat reported revenue of $608.8m ($575m in same period last year) and a net loss of $524.2m (loss of $2.57m) for its Q4 ended December 31, 2008. The net loss includes non-cash charges of $326.8m for orbital location impairments and $186.6m for a loss on undesignated interest rate swaps. The company’s EBITDA was a loss of $71.1m

Intelsat’s full-year revenues were $2,364.9m ($2,174m for 2008), which translated into a net loss of $1,198.2m (loss of $886m for 2008).

Making financial sense of Intelsat’s year-on-year position is not easy given that it has gone through a complex financial restructuring over the past two years, and also absorbed PanAmSat during the same period.

Intelsat’s system average fill rate on its approximately 2,125 station-kept transponders remained at 83% at December 31, 2008, the same rate as at September 30, 2008. In Q4, 19 net new transponders were put into service.

Intelsat announced several new launch contracts and its intent to accelerate the build and launch of 3 satellites, increasing the current number of satellites in development to 10, including the New Dawn satellite announced in December 2008.

Included in the 2009 launch program is the Intelsat 14 satellite that will feature a government-related hosted payload known as the Internet Router in Space, or IRIS. The Intelsat 15 satellite is also expected to launch in 2009.

© Rapid TV News 2009

Eutelsat is helping promote 3D at an upcoming Italian conference. The complete end-to-end 3D broadcasting chain will be showcased at the Sat Expo Europe show in Rome from March 19-21 using capacity on Eutelsat's Eurobird 3 satellite.

For the broadcast, a live 3D music performance is being filmed, transmitted and projected in stereo 3D-HD onto a cinema screen and prototype 3D-HD television sets.

Organised by Eutelsat, OpenSky and dBW, the demonstration is reproducing in full the conditions of a live 3D event. The three-dimensional shooting and production is managed by dBW, a Rome-based production company, while OpenSky, which specialises in transmitting digital content via satellite is managing the encoding, decoding and projection.

The three companies have also agreed to combine their resources and expertise in order to be able to provide end-to-end 3D services in Europe, from filming to playout.

The full-scale Rome 3D demo is, says Eutelsat, “a prelude to a radically new way of experiencing cinema and television content. In addition to enabling an audience to share the same level of sensation as in a theatre for a live performance, stereo 3D-HD has the potential to enrich the entertainment offer in cinemas and theatres and transform them into innovative multimedia entertainment centres delivering premium content.”

Eurobird 9A satellite has been transmitting a test 3D channel over the last three months as a test-bed to analyse the performance of screens, encoders and decoders, and to gather experience on the use of 3D content in the home and public locations.

Giuliano Berretta, Eutelsat CEO said: "This new step towards 3D broadcasting continues Eutelsat's longstanding commitment to innovation that opens satellites to a new generation of applications. Early and close collaboration between all actors in the broadcasting chain will be a key success factor for this new broadcasting revolution and we are very pleased to be taking part in the first tests and end-to-end demonstrations in Europe".

© Rapid TV News 2009

US internet television platform Joost has launched a German-language offer. Thirteen media partners such as Suddeutsche Zeitung TV and Welt der Wunder will deliver several hundred hours of German-language content for the service’s debut.
Feature films such as Rush Hour, American History X, Blade and Mr Nice Guy will also be available free of charge in the dubbed German version at [Only registered and activated users can see links. Click Here To Register...].

“We are speaking with all large media companies in the world. Germany is no exception,” Joost CEO Mike Volpi told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “We’re starting with smaller content providers and have to thereby prove to the big ones that we are a valuable partner. I hope that we can then also get their content.”

Joost plans to finance through advertising screened before the videos are played. The advertising revenue is shared between Joost and content providers. The web portal, which was launched in May 2007, is backed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of internet telephony service Skype and peer-to-peer file sharing platform KaZaA.

© Rapid TV News 2009

Strenghtening its presence in South East Asia, European news channel Euronews has launched in Indonesia and in the Philippines, where it is respectively carried on Telkomvision and digital cable network Skycable.

Available in English in both countries, Euronews was added to the Indonesian offer in Bali and Jakarta, before further development. Broadcast through the basic offer in the Philippines, the channel is now received into 170,000 new homes including Manila. This agreement with Skycable is the first in this country, which has a potential of more than 9 million TV homes.

In Oceania, Euronews is also broadcast now in Papua New Guinea through the Hitron network digital package.

With the new carriage agreements in the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, Euronews now reaches nearly four million homes in Asia and Oceania.

© Rapid TV News 2009

Multiteritoriální Pay-TV Digi TV platform to make substantial changes in the Nagravision conditional access system, which means that pirated excluded income, including the so-called AutoUpdate.

Digi TV is recently the most popular platform on the black market due to the use of the old system Nagravision 2 but also mainly because of the rich menu of attractive film and sports TV channels. This platform is one of the few services that have long nevypořádala black income. Other European platform has moved to a higher version of the coding system, possibly using a different coding system.

Pay-TV service is distributed via satellite, Intelsat 10-02 (1 ° W) and Thor 5 (0.8 ° W) and operates in six countries, including the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Is gaining viewers thanks to its rich menu of programs for a low price.

The Portuguese IPTV operator Meo has launched nine channels aimed at the main expatriate communities living the country.

The channels offered free of charge in the basic package are Inter + (Ukraine), Channel 1 and Russia Today (Russia), Pro TV (Romania), BNT (Bulgaria) and Phoenix CNE (China).

Three more channels will also be aired unencrypted until June 30, after which they will be only available for a premium fee.

The channels in question - SET Asia, SET Max and SAB TV - are aimed at the Indian community.

Meo added 72.000 new IPTV and DTH subscribers during the first quarter, bringing the total to 384.000.

Pay-TV clients represented 14.5% of the traffic generating lines and 51.1% of ADSL clients.

Around 50% of Meo IPTV clients used the VOD service, consuming on average 2.8 movies per month.

The international children’s channel KidsCo will make its debut on the Greek IPTV service conn-x TV on June 1.

KidsCo is owned by NBC Universal, Cookie Jar Group and Corus Entertainment Inc and already present in a number of key European territories including France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Russia and Poland.

Conn-x TV is meanwhile operated by the incumbent Greek telco OTE.

Spain's government will allocate a maximum of €165 million more for public broadcaster RTVE's 2009 budget, so compensating the corporation for the loss of advertisements.

New laws covering the public broadcaster, to be approved soon, anticipate RTVE won't have any more than €1,200 million in incomes and expenses during 2010-2011 although this amount could increase during the following three years. Growth is unlikely to be over 1% a year. From 2014 on, the amount will be even with inflation.

Apart from the State's allocations for RTVE, the government also anticipates a new income model based on a tax for the use of radioelectric services (80%), another on the private TV channels (3%) and one on the revenue of telcos (0.9%). This point has been very controversial because the country's telcos claim they don't have anything to do with the television market.

Included in the measures are a proposal to allow RTVE to commercialize its radio and TV content on the internet by means of a payment for basic packages. The government will also allow the Corporation to offer contents under conditional access in the case of value-added services.

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tmc Content Group, a Swiss media service provider specialising in erotic content, will launch pay-TV channel Lust Pur in Germany on June 1.

The service, which will be distributed on Eutelsat’s direct-to-cable platform KabelKiosk, screens erotic films, series, reports, documentaries and short videos from German and international producers each evening from 8pm to 6am CET. The target group is 20 to 59 year old men, women and couples. In order to meet youth protection requirements, programmes will be accessible before 11pm only after entering a youth-protection PIN. From 11pm the PIN is no longer necessary.

The channel, which until now carried the working title Blue Movie Soft, was granted a broadcasting licence by Berlin-Brandenburg’s media authority MABB. tmc Content Group, in which erotic industry group Beate Uhse holds a stake, already operates erotic channel Beate-Uhse.TV and adult video-on-demand services Blue Movie, Blue Movie Extra, Blue Movie Gay and redXclub.

The Bulgarian DTH platform Bulsatcom has taken another transponder on Greece’s Hellas Sat.
According to Parabola, it will be used to carry two of its existing channels (Film Plus HD and Eurosport HD), along with two new HD channels and some SD services.

Bulsatcom’s current HD offer also includes the channels Hobby TV HD and Music Plus HD. Its main programme packages are named ‘Economy’, ‘Standard’ and ‘Premium’, with the latter consisting of 16 channels, including TV 1000, AXN Sci-Fi and MTV Europe.

Bulsatcom is one of two DTH platforms in Bulgaria – the other being ITV Partner – and the most recent figures available indicated that the two had a combined subscriber total of around 90,000.

MTV Networks will launch its high definition television channel MTV Networks HD (MTVN HD) in Germany on June 3.

The music and entertainment channel, comprised of programmes from MTV, VH1 and NICK (Nickelodeon in the UK), will be available on the IPTV platform T-Home Entertain on Deutsche Telekom’s VDSL broadband network. MTVN HD screens concerts and events such as MTV Unplugged, MTV World Stage and VH1 Storytellers, award shows such as the MTV Video Music Awards and the MTV Europe Music Awards as well as footage from international music festivals such as the Roskilde and Oxegen festivals.

To celebrate the channel’s launch live concerts by Scottish band Franz Ferdinand and Swedish rock group Mando Diao will be screened on June 7 and June 21 respectively. On weekends a NICK programme window is offered with cartoons, including SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar – The Last Airbender and Jimmy Neutron.

Telekom announced at the beginning of March that it would include MTVN HD as part of its IPTV offer from summer. The channel, which was launched in Europe on 15 September 2008, is already available in many countries including France, the UK and Scandinavia.

South African pay-TV is in a mess. Even ICASA, the telecom and media authority, seemingly admits it has got things wrong, especially given that it is to re-advertise the planned pay-TV licence opportunities for the country.

Local reports state that, besides Multichoice, the other licences awarded by ICASA back in 2007 have gone badly wrong. None of the proposed – and newly licensed - services (to the ‘Walking on Water’ religious channel: On Digital Media, which has SES Astra as a junior partner; and Telkom Media) have yet to start transmissions.

Icasa chairman Paris Mashile said yesterday that the regulator would hold a second round of licensing to increase competition in the pay TV market. His announcement, at a breakfast briefing hosted by Neotel and the Mail & Guardian, came despite Icasa's recent statement that it would look at issuing satellite free-to-air licences as an alternative to pay TV, reported IOL Business Report.

David Moore, a media analyst at Africa Analysis, said: "I think Icasa is in a state of turmoil, and needs to pause and re-examine where its focus should be and how best to fulfill its mandate. "It needs to determine a single path to follow, and stick to it," he said. Its handling of Vodacom's listing was "a clear indicator that Icasa staff are not all reading from the same page. This situation just adds to that."

"It is not up to the regulator to decide competition issues. It is up to the market and the proper competition authorities… Icasa should award licenses to as many companies that want one and can reasonably prove that they can survive the market, and then let the market itself decide who sinks or swims. That is how it is done in the free market system."

IOL Business added that the industry has cautioned that the South African market would not accommodate more than two players, given that MultiChoice has already sewn up all content available and is targeting all segments of the market through its different bouquets. Media commentator Sei Mukoma said that if Icasa planned to issue new pay-TV licenses, it should do an intensive market study to ensure that the market could accommodate more operators. "The first round of licenses has not produced anything so far, as none of those licensed operators has launched services."

Mashile said that the new licensees, such as Walking on Water, had been given six months to commercially launch operations. If they failed to do so, the regulator would revoke their licenses. Telkom Media was recently sold to Shenzhen Media and there is still a veil of secrecy on its operational plans.

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The Polish station TV Puls may find a new strategic investor as soon as this June, though not, according to its president and leading shareholder Dariusz Dabski, at any price.

Quoted in Wirtualne Media, had added seven parties had so far expressed an interest in TV Puls, with two having put in bids.

He also said that finance was not the main issue in any deal, as TV Puls, which until last year was backed by News Corp, is aiming to become a leading player in the new Polish digital marketplace and programming was the priority.

TV Puls has secured a slot on the first DTT multiplex, due to make its debut this September, and also has plans to launch two thematic channels.

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The Franco German cultural channel Arte has launched the online video portal Arte Live Web, which offers a selection of music, dance, theatre and other performing arts.

The new portal is free-to-view and will offer both on-demand content and live ‘broadcasts’ of events including the Art Rock festival, which takes place this weekend in Saint-Brieuc and features acts including Birdy Nam Nam and Cold War Kids.

Arte Love Web is available in both German and French and comes in addition to the regular Arte video portal, which serves 2.5 million video requests a month, of which 1.7 million are Catch-up TV streams. The site will offer between 200 and 250 programmes.