Posts from ‘January, 2007’

The University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy is advocating a plan to extend the broadcasts of Radio and TV Martí beyond Cuba to the whole of Latin America in a post-Castro world.  In USC’s Public Diplomacy Blog, former executive of the US Information Agency Alvin Snyder says that the proposal is receiving guarded reaction [...]

Open-reel magnetic recording tape, once used by every broadcaster, is almost obsolete. The only remaining manufacturer of professional audio tapes is based here in the Netherlands. After more than 60 years, Quantegy Recording Solutions has discontinued producing tapes due to falling demand, as most broadcasters have switched to Hard Disks for storing their programmes. Quantegy itself produces a [...]

Premiere, Germany’s only  pay-television channel, said Monday it had acquired the German broadcasting  rights for British Premier League football matches until 2009-2010.  Premiere already broadcasts 120 Premier League matches but will expand its  coverage to 320 matches per season, it said. The German pay-TV broadcaster is hoping that the presence of German players  such as Jens Lehmann [...]

Text of report by Egyptian news agency MENA website
Cairo, 29 Jan: Egyptian [private] satellite “OTV” channel will be launched from Cairo at 1800 local time (2000 gmt) Wednesday evening [31 January] on Egyptian satellite Nilesat. The channel aims to present the Egyptian society’s views, especially the youth, on life as it is in Egypt [...]

A senior news broadcaster at the Voice of America, John Birchard, says in the Washington Post that “Trying to tell America’s story while wearing a gag is not helping the US cause.” Birchard writes in response to an earlier story in the newspaper that revealed nearly half those polled by the BBC in Europe, Africa, Asia, [...]

The Internet is set to revolutionise television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday. ”I’m stunned how people aren’t seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we’ve had,” he told [...]

Starting on 12 February, the Voice of America (VOA) begins a new daily radio broadcast in the Somali language to the Horn of Africa. A group of Somali broadcasters at VOA’s headquarters in Washington, DC will team up with freelance reporters in Africa and elsewhere around the world to provide millions of Somali speakers with accurate, up-to-date [...]

Recent improvements in compression technologies and bandwidth availability are set to revolutionise the way in which we consume broadcast content. Gartner has predicted that IPTV will reach 3.3 million homes in Western Europe this year and that this number will rise to 16.7 million in 2010, creating a £3 billion marketplace.
In parallel, the public’s appetite [...]

British Telecom (BT)  plans to launch an Internet TV service aimed at the UK’s Indian community that will allow viewers to watch Bollywood films without having to wait for their release in the country, a report said at the weekend. BT Vision, the group’s new internet TV arm, is keeping its Indian film catalogue under [...]

Dogan TV, a subsidiary of Dogan Yayin Holding, and NDS, a majority owned subsidiary of News Corporation, have signed a wide-ranging technology agreement that they say will ”revolutionize television” in Turkey. It will enable Turkish consumers to access free-to-air and premium content without a monthly subscription.
NDS will provide Dogan TV with its VideoGuard® conditional access (CA), MediaHighwayâ„¢ middleware and [...]

In a move to beef up its audience and test new advertising sales channels, the Czech branch of the French radio group Lagardere launched five Web radio stations in mid-January and has plans to continue expanding its online presence.
On 16 January, Lagardere launched Web radio stations Frekvence 1 Legendy and Frekvence 1 Romantika – exclusively airing [...]

Sudan’s two main television stations went  off the air for three minutes late yesterday in solidarity with Sami al-Haj, a  Sudanese cameraman detained since 2002 at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.  Sami al-Haj of the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera was arrested by the  Pakistani army on the Afghan border in December 2001 and has [...]

The Venezuelan government again insisted on Friday that refusal to renew the licence of a radio frequency emission is constitutional, legal and a sovereign right of the State as recognized by the International Telecommunication Union. Telecommunications and Computing Minister Jesse Chacon rejected assertions of Marcel Granier, director of the group that controls RCTV, whose concession for [...]

Digicel, the fastest-growing mobile telecommunications company in the Caribbean and new entrant to the Central American market, on Thursday launched its Digicel Mobile TV service in Jamaica.  Digicel, through its GSM/GPRS network, is the first mobile operator in the country to offer all live, all local TV programming. The Caribbean company has plans in place [...]

Polish Radio will begin broadcasting news in Hebrew in March in an attempt to strengthen Poland’s links with Israel and help it cast off what it believes is an unfair reputation for anti-Semitism. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe until World War Two, but the murder of millions in the Holocaust by the [...]