Posts from ‘July, 2007’

Despite local and international outcry, the Greek conservative government passed a new Act on 5 July which aims to regulate the country’s electronic media landscape. Only MPs from the ruling New Democracy party voted for the new law which restricts all small radio stations including minority language radio. All three opposition parties opposed it.
In particular, [...]

Radio Saigon Houston KREH 900 AM has taken a strong foothold in the Houston Vietnamese media market with programming that mixes talk shows with news and music.  The station, run by the husband-and-wife team of Duong Phuc and Vu Thanh Thuy, broadcasts mainly in the native tongue as well as bilingual programs to overcome these [...]

David de Jong writes: The German version of Radio Luxembourg became 50 years old on 15 July. What is today RTL Radio - die besten Hits aller Zeiten, began on 15 July 1957 as a German speaking request programme on Radio Luxembourg. The German broadcasts started originally only as one hour per day on mediumwave [...]

British pay-TV firm BSkyB  has agreed to buy Amstrad, the consumer electronics company run by celebrity businessman Alan Sugar, for £125 million ($253 million) in cash. Amstrad currently supplies around 30 percent of BSkyB’s set-top boxes. BSkyB said the deal would give it greater control over product design and technical specifications, allow it to accelerate the development of [...]

Minivan Radio will resume shortwave broadcasts from 1 August. The Maldivian opposition station has only been available via the Internet since it stopped shortwave broadcasts four months ago in anticipation of winning an FM licence, but has so far been unable to procure one. It has been decided to resume shortwave broadcasts in the run-up to a referendum in late [...]

Brian Q Silver, long-time chief of VOA’s Urdu Service, is taking on a new and broader role at Voice of America, becoming Ethnomusicologist and World Music Curator for the agency. Although the title is new, the job reflects the important role that both traditional and contemporary world music has come to play in VOA’s programming.
In this [...]

An announcer from a North Korean government based radio broadcast, “The Voice of Chosun” is believed to be a Japanese person abducted from Tottori prefecture in 1988.
In a telephone conversation with the Daily NK on the 26th, Kazuhiro Araki, representative for Investigation Commission on Missing Japanese Probably Related to N Korea asserted, “On comparing the [...]

Al-Zawraa TV, the pro-Sunni satellite television channel known for showing footage of insurgent attacks on US-led coalition forces is no longer being observed on the Arabsat-owned Badr 3 satellite by BBC Monitoring.
The station has not been observed on its last known frequency (Badr 3 at 26 degrees east, 11766MHz horizontal polarization) since 30 July. A [...]

David de Jong reports: Rai International, the international division of Italian public broadcaster Rai, and the Italian government have signed a new convention about the future of Rai International. The document was signed at a ceremony last Thursday by Rai President Claudio Petruccioli, together with Piero Badaloni, Managing Director of Rai International, and Italian Prime [...]

US cable giant Liberty Global is considering submitting a bid for British media company Virgin Media, the American firm’s chairman told the Financial Times in an interview published ths morning. John Malone told the business daily that while his interest was exploratory, Liberty Global was “doing our homework.” 
“We have to look at it, not in a traditional [...]

Arqiva has been awarded a contract by SDN Ltd - a wholly-owned subsidiary of ITV plc - to design, build and operate a new national digital terrestrial TV network in the UK in preparation for digital switchover. The contract will run until 2034 and is estimated to be worth in the region of £500 million [...]

Maori Television will host the first World Indigenous Television Broadcasting Conference in Auckland on March 26-28 next year. The conference is expected to bring together about 300 of the world’s top indigenous broadcasters from countries such as Ireland, Canada, Wales, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. It will also see the presentation of an inaugural lifetime [...]

Text of report in English by South Korean newspaper Choson Ilbo website on 30 July
Korea Telecom plans to launch an Internet protocol television service (IPTV) in Russia before doing so at home.
In a news conference in Vladivostok on Sunday [29 July], KT President Nam Joong-soo said “Trial service will begin August in Russia’s Maritime Province [...]

David de Jong reports: Rai Way, the technical transmission department of Italian public broadcaster Rai, together with commercial radio associations Club DAB Italia, C.R. DAB and EuroDAB, have agreed on a pilot for DMB broadcasts in Rome. Club DAB started broadcasting with five radio stations in the DAB+ (the plus stands for AAC+) standard in [...]

Cuban immigrants recently arrived in Florida have told Associated Press that the US-operated TV Martí is still difficult to receive in Cuba, despite the US government’s acquisition of a new Gulf stream jet to broadcast the signal into the country. An immigrant from Havana said that it can be seen in good conditions, but Cubans from [...]