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RTL Television continued to be Germany’s most watched television channel in May. According to the latest GfK figures, the Cologne-based channel reached an average audience market share among viewers of all ages of 14.5 per cent last month. Public broadcasters ARD and ZDF followed with 14.2 and 12.3 per cent while RTL’s main competitors Sat 1 and Pro 7 reached 10.3 and 8.4 per cent.

Marco Deutsch, who since mid-1999 has been managing director of Deutsche Telekom’s subsidiary Media Services (MSG), is to leave the company. He is rumoured to be taking over as managing director of Munich-based entertainment channel TM3. The management change is believed to be part of a larger plan by Rupert Murdoch, the channel’s new 100 per cent shareholder, to completely revamp TM3, probably into a fitness and health service. It is unclear if TM3’s current managing director Jochen Krohne who led the channel under the flagship of former majority shareholder Herbert Kloiber will remain at the channel.
A special digital TV channel is to be set up to cover the forthcoming SmauComm Mediterraneo exhibition. The event, which covers telecommunications and networking, takes place in Rome between June 14 and 17. Smau Channel will carry live coverage of all the main conferences and will report on all new innovations shown at the exhibition. Smau Channel is a joint venture between Smau, Eutelsat and Telespazio.

Markus Fritz has taken over from Gernot Busch as the managing director of Astra Marketing GmbH, SES’s marketing operation, in the German-speaking territories. 34 year-old Fritz was trade marketing manager at Astra Marketing from Mid-1997 to the end of 1998.

The federal German anti-media concentration Kommission zur Ermittlung der Konzentration im Medienbereich (KEK) has approved the sale of the shares owned by Canal+ owns general entertainment channel Vox to RTL Television and its parent company CLT-Ufa. According to the KEK, RTL now holds 49.9 per cent in Vox, Ufa Film und Fernseh- 49,8 per cent and TV production company DCTP 0.3 per cent. The decision means that CLT-Ufa can now proceed with its plan to include Vox into the RTL channel family, currently consisting of RTL Television, RTL2 and Super RTL.

Kirch Media is to group together its involvement in a number of sports rights agencies under a single holding company, Kirch Sport GmbH. According to the Munich-based media company, the companies affected are Prisma Sports & Media (in which Kirch Media holds an 85 per cent share), CWL (95 per cent) and ISPR (50 per cent). The three agencies market national and international sports events such as the football World Cups in 2002 and 2006 as well as the Wimbledon tennis championships, games from individual football clubs, the IIHF ice hockey World Cups and the German football Bundesliga. In the new group, the sports rights agencies are to co-ordinate and extend their co-operation. Stephen Dixon currently managing director of Prisma will head Kirch Sport.

Spanish digital DTH platform Canal Satelite Digital has announced that it now has more than 900,000 subscribers. Over the past year, the Sogecable-led company has added more than 200,000 subscribers, a quarter of that in the last four months, according to the company. Catalonia, with 191,915 subscribers, and Madrid, with 148,603 subs, are the regions with most subscribers, although in relative terms the Canary Islands takes the lion’s share with 18 per cent of households subscribed to the platform.

The Austrian government has delayed until further notice its plan to mandate a common interface slot in digital set-top-boxes in order to prevent a monopoly arising in the decoder market. This is a move that would have effectively banned the d-box, the receiver developed by Kirch’s Beta Research division, which public broadcaster ORF had selected in conjunction with the proprietary Betacrypt conditional access system for its DTH satellite transmissions. The d-box lacks a common interface.

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