Focus: Broadcasting

LORL Loral Space & Communications Inc. will sell $300 million of stock to its largest shareholder, MHR Fund Management LLC, Loral announced Oct. 17. The proceeds, combined with existing resources, will be used to pursue internal and external growth opportunities, including transactions or alliances. MHR will purchase $41 million and $259 million of new Loral...

Digital+, the Spanish pay-TV operator, has seen very slow subscriber growth in the last quarter, although it did reach an important milestone by surpassing 2 million subscribers. Sogecable, the owners of the Digital+ platform, announced this week that Digital+ added only 16,000 customers in the company’s third quarter to finish with slightly more than 2...

Australia is one of the most dynamic pay-TV markets in Asia, and the country’s geography and large numbers of households situated in remote areas of the country making it an ideal market in which satellite can make a significant impact. Two of the operators leading the way in this area are Foxtel and Austar who...

NFL fans in Washington and Miami are getting their games on more than ever through a pilot program between Kangaroo TV and DirecTV. Using Kangaroo TV’s handheld unit with a 4-by-3 inch screen, visitors to the Washington Redskins’ Fedex Field or Miami Dolphins’ Dolphins Field can watch any game available on DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket...

The competition for satellite pay-TV operators is getting more intense around the globe, with traditional rival cable now joined by a growing number of telcos eager to gain a slice of the lucrative pay-TV market. While some direct-to-home (DTH) satellite operators have formed partnerships with telcos, the reality is telcos look to be strong competition...

An arbitrator denied XM Satellite Radio’s request to recover 20 percent of the value of two Boeing-built satellites, XM announced in a Sept. 27 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The XM-1 and XM-2 satellites suffered from power loss due to a solar panel problem that affected a group of Boeing satellites based...

Systems By Greg Berlocher Since their inception, network management systems have made the metamorphic change from basic monitoring aids to feature-rich management tools. Built on powerful and robust computing platforms, today’s network management systems now can deliver a host of valuable services to corporations, carriers and governments, and the term management system no longer is...

By Peter J. Brown The movie industry is waking up to the fact that satellite-based distribution today represents a viable alternative to the old way of distributing films. When it comes to security, reliability, flexibility and cost effectiveness, satellite can do it all. The industry’s de facto d-cinema standard was published by Los Angeles-based Digital...

SES Americom‘s new Internet-protocol (IP) TV service promises "a front-row seat to the next phase of video technology" for more than 30 programmers and networks that have signed deals to distribute content via the system, a company executive said. SES Americom unveiled IP Prime, an IPTV distribution solution for the U.S. market, in September 2005....

DTV Lost amid widely published speculation last week that Rupert Murdoch might divest his interests in DirecTV were definitive answers about what such a move would mean to the satellite TV industry at large: If Murdoch’s News Corp. were to sell its estimated $10 billion interest in DirecTV to Liberty Media for the latter’s 20...