Posts from ‘September, 2006’

David de Jong writes: American Forces Network (AFN) will cease its analogue television broadcasts in Italy. It means that 17 transmitters - some receivable over a wide area - will stop broadcasting the American NTSC signals terrestrially in the Italian pelinsula, according to the Italian website Digital-Sat. As far as is known, the frequencies will go [...]

The Voice of America (VOA) launched the first full news hour of a new radio broadcasting service to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region this week. In the coming months VOA Deewa (Light) Radio will expand to 6 hours of daily news programming.
“VOA Deewa’s first hour-long daily newscast marks the beginning of a new Pashto language radio [...]

The new office building at the Radio Netherlands Bonaire relay station has been officially opened. It replaces the old building, located some distance away from the transmitter site, that had been in use since the station opened in 1969. The original reason for having the office located away from the transmitters was that, in the [...]

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has placed an embargo on frequency bands potentially suitable for use by broadcasting services using Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM). These bands are outside the broadcasting services bands used by traditional broadcasting services.
“ACMA intends to plan for the introduction of Digital Radio Mondiale but is also aware that international arrangements [...]

Islamist gunmen who captured the Somali port of Kismayo have forcibly closed a private media network which they accuse of distorting news about protests against the takeover, journalists said on Friday. Islamist fighters on battle-wagons turned up at HornAfrik Radio’s Kismayo offices late on Thursday, ordering staff to stop operations, the National Union of Somali Journalists [...]

Ondas Media (Ondas) has announced further expansion of its senior team to bring satellite media and radio to Europe in 2009. John Yates has been appointed as senior vice president of network engineering, Jason Jones as vice president of broadcast operations and Martin Charman as vice president of broadcast technology.
Yates will have responsibility for the establishment [...]

Arabic news channel Al Jazeera has been removed today from the Sky EPG line-up at the “broadcaster’s request”, reports SkyDigiOnline.co.uk. A Sky spokesman confirmed to SkyDigiOnline that Al Jazeera had made this request and there was no other reason for the removal. The channel, which had been broadcasting on EPG 799, is expected to launch [...]

A controversial nationalist in Slovakia’s government coalition hopes to overhaul the country’s public television and radio stations, the Pravda newspaper reported Friday. Jan Slota, an ally of Prime Minister Robert Fico, and his Slovak National Party (SNS) have proposed “switching media politics to nationalist,” the report said.
The full cabinet led by Fico’s Smer party will now [...]

29 September 2006 is the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the BBC’s Third Programme, now known as Radio 3. The station is celebrating this anniversary with live concerts and specially commissioned programmes. From the Radio 3 website you can download a PDF file of the Radio Times containing the first week’s programmes, and there [...]

The Voice of America (VOA) will debut two 30-minute television news programmes to Afghanistan beginning September 30. The Saturday-through-Thursday newscasts, which will air in the Dari and Pashto languages in a one-hour block titled TV Ashna (Friend), will offer a new source of regional and world news to Afghanistan’s emergent television market.
TV Ashna will also [...]

The US State Department has allocated $1 million to fund radio broadcasting business for North Korea led by three organizations for North Korean human rights in South Korea for the first year of business. A source in Washington yesterday said, “$1 million of US State Department budget was approved by the Congress and recently offered [...]

Radio World Online has published an article by H Donald Messer, chairman of the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) Technical Committee. He says that consumer receivers “at starter production levels” are available in Europe. Mass production of these and other models is expected in the coming months. Another interesting point made by Dr Messer is that, for “local” [...]

The Dutch radio listening figures for July/August 2006 were released this morning by research bureau Intomart GfK. It was a good month for the public broadcasters, with Radio 2 increasing its market share by 0.6%, and the regional stations increasing their cumulative share by the same amount. Radio 538 remains the market leader, but its share [...]

The latest Bandwidth Report by Website Optimization shows that 64 million people now have broadband access across the 25 countries of the European Union  (EU) - but the gap between the best and worst performers is widening. Denmark, the Netherlands, and Finland lead the European Union in broadband penetration while Greece, Slovakia, and Poland trail [...]

Iva Toguri D’Aquino, convicted for being “Tokyo Rose”, has died in Chicago at the age of 90. During World War II, the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose from Japan demoralized GIs. After the War, Iva Toguri was tried for treason - but later pardoned by President Gerald Ford after the trial was revealed to be a sham.
Read the story [...]