Chris Dziadul examines Telenor’s plans for Central and Eastern Europe. Telenor Satellite Broadcasting (TSB) is not a company that readily comes to mind in Central and Eastern Europe, which is already served by several other leading satellite service providers including Eutelsat, SES-Astra and Spacecom’s Amos. However, it already has a long-established presence in the region [...]

Chris Dziadul looks at developments in Latvia. The news that News Corp. has acquired two of Latvia’s leading commercial TV stations should come as no surprise to those who follow developments in the Baltic country’s broadcasting industry. Despite its small size, Latvia has the fastest expanding economy in the EU, the 10.7% rise in GDP [...]

Chris Dziadul analyses Liberty Global’s latest results Liberty Global’s involvement in Central and Eastern Europe looks as if it is about to enter a new and interesting phase. First quarter results published by the company show that the take up of both broadband Internet access and VoIP grew in all six regional markets the company [...]

Polsat has been a regular feature of the Polish media landscape for over a decade. Starting life as a satellite-delivered service up-linked from The Netherlands, it soon secured a terrestrial licence and went on to become – alongside publicly owned TVP and commercial rival TVN – one of the country’s three leading broadcasters. Although its [...]

Chris Dziadul reviews developments in the Czech Republic Perhaps the clearest message to emerge from this week’s Czech Association of Competitive Communications (CACC) conference in Prague was that the country’s electronic communications industry currently finds itself in a state of flux. In the cable sector, Liberty Global’s high-profile acquisition of the second largest operator Karneval, [...]

A series of announcements in the last few days have served to underline the increasingly important role played by Sistema-backed Comstar-UTS in Russia’s electronic communications marketplace. Eric Franke, Comstar-UTS’s president and CEO, says the company is a telco rather than broadcaster, focusing its attention on such areas as interactive TV and IP over broadband. And [...]

Chris Dziadul looks at developments in Bulgarian cable The process of consolidation that has been a constant feature in cable markets throughout the region in recent years is finally being felt in Bulgaria. While CableTel’s acquisition of Evrotur will not create a near-monopoly situation comparable to that in the Czech Republic, for instance, it will [...]

Earlier this week the Polish public broadcaster chose Andrzej Urbanski as its new president. Succeeding the controversial Bronislaw Wildstein, who vacated the post just over a month ago, he will have the none-too-easy task of mapping out a course for the station. Despite the fierce competition that exists between the Polish national commercial services Polsat [...]

No one can doubt the huge advances that have been made by Central and Eastern Europe’s TV industry in recent years, though especially since eight countries in the region joined the EU in May 2004. However, they have been far from uniform, and there is clearly much work that still needs to be done. This [...]

Romtelecom’s latest results only serve to highlight the increasingly competitive nature of the Romanian electronic communications marketplace. The telco, which is owned by its Greek counterpart OTE (54.01%) and Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology – MCTI (45.99%), has undoubtedly had its work cut out following full market liberalisation. Today, it finds itself operating [...]