Satdude

Satellite news 27.04.04

News

BS*yB GETS AWAY ENGLAND MATCHES
In an exclusive multimillion-pound deal with the body
that handles the rights for more than 30 national
associations throughout Europe, S*y will now show
England's opening World Cup qualifying matches in
Austria and Poland later this year as well as the away
tie in Azerbaijan in October. Under the new deal, S*y
Sports also won the rights to three Wales games, three
Northern Ireland games and two Republic of Ireland
away matches. The deal means any serious England fan
will have to continue subscribing to S*y Sports to
follow the team's progress towards the 2006 World Cup
in Germany. The deal covers 11 away games played by
the home nations during the World Cup qualification
period and the matches join another 15 live games
already scheduled by S*y Sports, which holds the
rights to home games for Scotland, Wales and the
Republic of Ireland.

BS*yB FAVOURITE FOR HORSE RACING CHANNEL
A bid to create a new TV channel dedicated to horse
racing will this week be put to the owners of the
country's 59 race courses. BS*yB and Arena Leisure,
the racecourse operator, will write to the courses
with detailed proposals to buy the broadcast rights
for British racing. Three weeks ago, Attheraces, the
UK's only horse racing television channel, stopped
broadcasting British races after it failed to generate
the revenues expected from its interactive betting
services. Attheraces was a joint venture between
BS*yB, Arena and Channel 4. Despite the demise of
Attheraces, comprehensive television coverage of horse
racing by Satellite Information Services continued to
be shown in betting shops. The competition to provide
a successor to Attheraces has now become a two-way
battle. BS*yB and Arena, which will keep the
Attheraces brand, are competing with the Horse Racing
Channel, a proposed consortium which would be owned by
race courses with each holding a small stake. The
Horse Racing Channel has reached agreements with eight
race courses, and the Racecourse Holdings Trust, which
owns 13 courses including Aintree, Newmarket,
Cheltenham and Sandown Park, has expressed support.

PROFITS UP AT CHANNEL 4
Pretax profit at Channel 4 almost tripled last year to
£45 million, compared with a year-earlier £16.5
million, on essentially flat revenue of £770 million,
CEO Mark Thompson said on April 20. The rise marks the
firm's highest level of pretax profit since 1999,
Thompson said. The FilmFour unit lost £3.7 million
last year, compared with a loss of £28.7 million in
2002. The film venture and a now-closed horse racing
channel together brought the commercial arm of the
broadcaster into the red by £10.1 million last year,
compared with a year-earlier £56 million loss. Channel
4 also reduced its costs by about £10 million last
year even as it increased its programming budget to
its highest-ever level, £457 million ($820.5 million).

MBE TEAMS UP WITH A.G. MEDIA
A.G. Media Group, Inc., on April 19 announced the
signing of a strategic alliance agreement with U.K.
based television network, Major Black Entertainment,
Ltd. Under the agreement, A.G. Media's Content
Services division will develop new programming for the
MBE 24/7 network as well as explore other related
media initiatives. The newly expanded MBE 24/7 is
expected to launch in the third quarter of 2004. MBE
24-7 launched on February 16 and currently has an
audience of 39 million households in the United
Kingdom and surrounding European regions, Major Black
Entertainment TV is Europe's first television network
providing programming comprised of Black cultural
content. The channel is free to air and is on both the
Eurobird and Hotbird Satellites covering Europe and

BS*yB TO AUCTION PREMIER LEAGUE MATCHES
An auction for Premier League football will begin this
week when BS*yB invites bids for a package of matches.
The pay-TV broadcaster is offering eight games a
season from its latest TV deal following intervention
from the European commission. Brussels officials
ordered a restructuring of its £1.024 billion deal
with the league, which runs from next season until
2007, after describing the rights-selling process as
anti-competitive. Under the terms of the compromise,
BS*yB must sub-license eight "top quality" matches to
a rival broadcaster. These games will be drawn from
the cheapest of four rights packages featuring 31
matches kicking-off at 5.15pm on Saturdays but will
include top-ranking teams. Sources close to the
auction process said broadcasters would be contacted
with an "invitation to tender" in the next few days.

REGULATOR CALLS ON BBC TO REASSESS ACTIVITIES
U.K. media regulator Ofcom, as part of its public
service broadcasting review, has issued a range of
suggestions for the BBC, including the possibility of
distributing license fee funds to other U.K.
broadcasters. Ofcom's public service broadcasting
review is expected to be complete by December. It
seeks to measure how the terrestrials BBC One, BBC
Two, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five are living up to their
public service obligations. The preliminary findings
of Ofcom's review show that for the main terrestrials,
audience share declined from 87 per cent to 76 per
cent from 1998 to 2003. In addition, erosion was
prominent in the 16 to 34 demographic, where audience
share fell to 69 per cent.

ITV RENEWS FORMULA 1 TV RIGHTS
ITV has signed a new five-year deal with formula one
boss Bernie Ecclestone, which will keep the world's
premier motor racing series on the network until 2010.
For the first time since it poached F1 from the BBC in
1997, ITV has negotiated a deal that allows the
broadcaster to show grand prix action on ITV2 and the
soon to launch ITV3, as well as its main terrestrial
channel, ITV1. When the new deal begins, from the
start of the 2006 season, ITV is planning to offer
expanded coverage of grand prix races across all of
its channels.

FRANCE

SENATE PASSES TELECOM BILL
The French Senate has passed a bill which turns the
telecom package - the six European Commission
directives from 2002 harmonizing the regulations for
telecom and broadcasting networks - into French
legislation and aims to encourage competition. The
bill passed includes in particular an amendment that
maintains throughout a change-over period of five
years the obligation on cable and satellite operators
to broadcast the free-to-air terrestrial channels.
This so-called must-carry rule is intended - in the
context of the spread of digital broadcasting - to
allow cable and satellite subscribers the time to buy
a decoder. It also applies to RFO which is soon due to
join France Télévisions. TV5 is also to be provided
free of charge for cable and satellite subscribers.
Under current rules, the cable networks have the
obligation to distribute all terrestrial channels free
of charge, while for satellite operators the
obligation limited to public service channels only.
The senators also increased the threshold at which a
terrestrial television service is considered as a
national service, from 10 to 12 million inhabitants.
In a bid to "ensure the success of digital terrestrial
television", the senators voted an amendment that
states that "broadcasting television services in
analogue terrestrial will cease five years after the
actual start of digital broadcasts".

TF1 SEEKS TO PURCHASE HISTOIRE CHANNEL
French broadcaster TF1 has entered into exclusive
negotiations to acquire the ailing French channel
Histoire. The thematic channel, which reported losses
of more than ?800,000 in 2003, has been up for sale
for several months. Late last week France's AB Groupe
and the French subsidiary of the National Geographic
channel appeared to be the main contenders, but
latecomer TF1 has secured exclusive talks. "TF1's
offer was the most interesting for us financially and
in terms of safeguarding the current staff structure
and we have entered into exclusive negotiations with
them," said Christian Vion, joint managing director of
Arte France -- the public arts channel which owns
52.5% of Histoire with pubcaster France Televisions
and France's public Institut National de l'Audiovisuel
(INA). Started in July 1997, the Histoire channel has
3.3 million subscribers via cable and satellite and is
estimated to be worth ?4 million. The deal with TF1,
which also involves the takeover of 30% of the
company's stake from film company Gaumont and 8.75%
each from France Telecom's Wanadoo and French cable
company Noos, should be completed within a month, Vion
said. Meanwhile, first-quarter advertising revenue for
commercial TV network TF1 increased 6.1% to ?425.1
million.

CANAL SATELLITE OPTS FOR KUDELSKI MEDIAGUARD
Nagra France, a subsidiary of Swiss-based Kudelski
Group that develops the MediaGuard conditional access
system, announced that pay-TV operator Canal Satellite
has chosen MediaGuard to secure content delivery of
its programming services over an ADSL network. The new
service, CanalsatDSL, will be released to customers in
Paris in May and subsequently to other French cities
in following months. The target audience for the
service is about 3 million homes and will mainly
available in city centres - but not accessible by
satellite. The MediaGuard conditional access solution
protects content transmitted over hybrid broadcast DVB
and TV-over-DSL networks. With this agreement, Canal
hopes to significantly reduce content security and
operational costs, as the MediaGuard will allow the
company to offer either the same or different
programming packages over satellite as well as over
ADSL. Furthermore, the single-server architecture
offers seamless pay-per-view and video on demand at a
minimum cost.

GERMANY

PROSIEBENSAT1 LEADS TV AD MARKET
Haim Saban's broadcasting group ProSiebenSat 1
surpassed rival RTL Television in Germany's TV
advertising market during the first quarter of the
year. According to Variety, ProSiebenSat 1, increased
its audience share and saw a 5.8% boost in gross ad
sales to 43.6% in the quarter to March; RTL's notched
up 42.9%. ProSiebenSat 1 includes main channels
ProSieben and Sat 1 as well as Kabel 1 and news
channel N24. RTL operates flagship web RTL Television,
RTL 2, children's channel Super RTL, VOX and news net
n-tv.

IRELAND

S*y NEWS IRELAND LAUNCHES IN MAY
BS*yB has announced that its new dedicated news
service for Ireland will launch on May 10. There will
be two half-hour bulletins each evening, at 19:00 and
22:00, which will cover news, sport and weather across
the country. At weekends a 'Review of the Week' will
be shown at 19:00 and 22:00. Over two-thirds of all
households in Ireland will be able to receive the new
S*y News service via cable/MMDS or satellite. Irish
expatriates in Europe who wish to receive S*y News
Ireland should tune to Astra 2D at 28.2 East, 12.207
GHz V, SR 27500, FEC 2/3. The service is free to air.

ITALY

EU CENSURES BERLUSCONI
Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio
Berlusconi was censured by the European Parliament on
April 22 for maintaining undue control over Italian
broadcasting despite pledging three years ago to
divest his media interests. The Parliament vote in
Strasbourg was passed despite Berlusconi's Forza
Italia party attempting to derail the action by
attaching some 338 amendments. The censure resolution
calls for laws to prevent politicians or candidates
from having major media interests and urges the
European Commission -- the European Union's executive
authority -- to draft a proposal to prevent media
monopoly abuses. The resolution said Berlusconi has
failed to honor the pledge he made when he became
prime minister in 2001 to resolve the conflict of
interest on media ownership. The report says he has
increased his controlling shares in Mediaset, Italy's
largest private television group. And the report says
there are repeated and documented instances of
governmental interference, pressure and censorship of
the corporate structure and schedules of the RAI
public television service.

THE NETHERLANDS

KPN TO INCREASE DIGITENNE STAKE
Dutch telecom operator KPN aims to increase its
holding in digital DVB-T television provider
Digitenne. KPN currently has a 30 per cent stake in
the company and hopes to increase that to 49 per cent
in order to compete with cable providers who provide
TV to 97 per cent of homes in the Netherlands. The
Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs must first approve
such a move, but three years ago had restricted KPN to
a 30 per cent holding in the company. Nozema, the
Netherlands Broadcasting Transmission Company,
currently has a 30 per cent share in Digitenne, NOB
has a further 30 per cent and public broadcasters the
remaining ten per cent.

SPAIN

REGIONAL GOVERNMENTS AGAINST DTT PLAN
Spain's regional Governments are challenging the
Central Administration over the recently-approved
Local DTT Technical Plan. The Regional Authorities of
Catalonia have appealed against the new local DTT rule
arguing that the allocation of multiplex has been very
unfair to Catalonia. The new legislation, approved by
the former conservative Government, allocated 266
multiplexes throughout Spain, of which 20 were granted
to Catalonia, fewer than expected. In its appeal, the
Catalonian Government has asked for more multiplexes
as those 20 only represent 7.5 per cent of all
multiplexes, despite the fact, according to it, that
around 13-14 per cent of all local television stations
are currently operating in this region. The Government
of Andalucia has also announced a similar appeal
against the local DTT rule. As a result, the new
socialist Government is considering changing the local
DTT legislation and putting aside the Technical Plan
approved by the previous Administration.

SOGECABLE LOSSES UP
Leading pay-TV operator Sogecable, owner of digital
satellite platform Digital Plus and terrestrial pay-TV
channel Canal Plus, has declared a loss of ?47.7
million in the first quarter of the year against ?17.2
million the same period last year. The company,
however, managed to increase by 41 per cent its net
turnover reaching ?379.4 million. Revenues per
subscriber grew by 44 per cent up to ?287.5 million
due to the complete migration of former Via Digital's
subscribers to Digital Plus. As of March 31, Sogecable
had 2.27 million subscribers, of which 77 per cent,
subscribe to Digital Plus and the rest to the analogue
version of Canal Plus. The ARPU reached ?50.7 per
month, against ?43.5 the previous quarter.

SWEDEN

MTG REPORTS HIGHER PROFITS
Swedish media group Modern Times Group MTG reported on
April 20 an operating profit (EBIT) of SEK85 million
on net sales of SEK1,571 million for the financial
period January-March 2004. Both operating profit
(EBIT) and net sales for the three-month period
increased, respectively from SEK80 million and
SEK1,513 million, as compared to the corresponding
period in 2003. The company said that it would
continue investment in programming to drive ratings
and increase the share of viewing for its pay-TV.

UKRAINE

TV LANGUAGE RULE CRITICISED
Ukrainian television chiefs have reacted angrily to
measures to introduce license restrictions on stations
that do not meet new requirements to broadcast
exclusively in the local language. Under Ukrainian
Television and Radio Broadcasting Council rules that
took effect on April 19, approvals for new terrestrial
broadcasting licenses may be refused if stations do
not provide 100% of content in Ukrainian. Regional
stations airing in the country's predominantly
Russiaphone eastern half must broadcast at least 50%
of their programs in Ukrainian, despite the fact that
the overwhelming majority of their viewers are native
Russian speakers. Those who fall foul of the new rules
may lose their licenses, though under current laws
only the country's courts have the power to revoke
licenses.

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