Posts from ‘January, 2011’

Britain is to give News Corp a final chance to avoid a prolonged and costly investigation into its proposed $12 billion buyout of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), in a move that is likely to draw criticism from rivals. Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, has already examined the deal over fears it would give Rupert Murdoch’s News [...]

The media can play a big role in reducing the impact of disasters, a senior United Nations official said today. Brigitte Leoni, Head of Communications at the UN Inter-Agency Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, said the media could alert their audiences about the increasing risks and help them become more resilient in [...]

Radio Prague, which makes its final shortwave transmissions on 31 January, will continue to produce its 30-minute programmes in six languages. However the Head of Radio Prague, Miroslav Krupicka, has told the station’s English programme Mailbox that “We wanted to make the programme cheap and we’ll play music – Czech music on Sundays.”
A listener from the [...]

The Southern African Broadcasting Association (SABA) will carry out a survey of the Broadcasting archives of 13 African countries including Angola, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland. The main objective of the survey is to determine the extent of content preservation, digitization projects, material at risk and general archive practices within broadcast institutions in Southern Africa, within [...]

The BBC is to reshape BBC Online by 2013 to deliver its public service mission in the digital age. The reorganisation will mean the service licence budget for BBC Online is reduced by a quarter. It will also require the closure of up to 360 posts.
The changes, which have been approved by the BBC Trust, [...]

Czech commercial all-news channel Z1, backed by Czech-Slovak investment group J&T, will stop broadcasting this week due to a lack of profitability, it said today. J&T said further investments in the channel, which launched in 2008, did not produce a return. Z1 will end broadcasts tomorrow (Tuesday).
Z1 competed with state broadcaster Czech Television’s 24-hour news [...]

After a decision of the provisional Government of National Unity, Hannibal TV resumed its broadcasting on Sunday eveninga fter an interruption of a few hours. This interruption took place after the announcement, on Sunday, by an authorised source of the arrest of the owner of the channel and his son for “high treason” and “conspiracy” [...]

Free North Korea Radio, a South Korea-based shortwave station targeting North Koreans, saw its annual financial support of 400,000 to 500,000 US dollars from the US government more than halved last year, a first since the station`s foundation in 2004, due to accounting errors. Mainly led by North Korean defectors, the station lets North Koreans [...]

European broadcasting group ProSiebenSat.1 has begun the process of selling some of its assets to pay down debt but is unsure whether it will succeed, Chief Executive Thomas Ebeling said. ProSieben, which is majority-owned by private equity firms KKR and Permira, wants to sell parts of SBS Broadcasting and operations in Belgium and the Netherlands. [...]

Tunisia has arrested the owner of a private TV station and his son for “grand treason” for inciting violence and working for ousted leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s return, the state news agency said today.
“The owner of Hannibal TV (Larbi Nasra), who is a relative of the former president’s wife, is using the channel to [...]

The Tongan radio station BroadCom could be back on the air within weeks. BroadCom’s FM 88.1 was ordered to cease broadcasting after last November’s election. It had been using a borrowed licence held by the publisher Kalafi Moala, who withdrew it after the government said there had been complaints about the station’s broadcasts.
BroadCom’s managing director, [...]

The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) is set to launch an enhanced QF Radio today in an event at 4pm at the Villaggio Mall. QF Radio, a station for locally produced programming and summaries of international news, will be broadcast globally over the Internet and will cover Qatar on the frequency [...]

RCTV television channel, suspended a year ago by the government of President Hugo Chávez, is reapplying for permission to resume pay cable TV programming in Venezuela, its director said on Friday.
“It’s been a year since the unconstitutional, illegal and arbitrary closure of the broadcasts of RCTV International, via subscription television in [...]

Sri Lanka will switch off analogue TV transmissions from 2018, converting itself to a more advanced technology of digital broadcasting, Telecom Regulatory Commission Director General Anusha Pelpita told Sunday Observer. The pilot project will begin to replace the existing technology by Digital Video Broadcasting – second generation Terrestrial (DVB-T2) from the Western Province in 2017.
“Most [...]

Duch media tycoon John de Mol said last night on the television programme Pauw & Witteman that he is interested in purchasing the TV channels of SBS in the Netherlands and Belgium. The stations are currently owned by German media group ProSiebenSat.1.
Mr De Mol said he has not yet made a bid, but one will [...]