Setanta enters administration
The UK arm of Setanta Sports entered administration on Tuesday after weeks of uncertainty, immediately placing 200 of the pay-TV broadcaster’s 420 employees out of work. Administrators Deloitte have been appointed as administrators of the UK business, though it is hoped it may still be possible to find a buyer for the businesses in Ireland, the United States and Canada, with Chellomedia a potential purchaser of the Irish business. The Disney-owned sports network ESPN has secured the 46 live matches previously held by Setanta Sports for the 2009/10 season, along with 23 matches a season between 2010 and May 2013. ESPN America was one of a number of channels, also including Racing UK, which have been forced to reappraise their distribution having previously been bundled as part of the Setanta package. ESPN has switched to the News & Events pack within Sky basic and has added distribution on the terrestrial platform Top Up TV and BT Vision.

This report, which is part of the Broadband TV News Briefing Series, looks at the cable industries of the 14 largest markets in CEE. Besides providing an up-to-date overview of each market, it also includes detailed sections on the key players, where they currently stand in the digitalisation process and their plans for the future. Buy Now from the Broadband TV News Shop.

ZDF chooses 720p/50 amidst controversy
The German public broadcaster ZDF has chosen the EBU recommended HD standard 720p/50 and will increase the amount of HD showcase programming on satellite. The broadcaster will increase the amount of showcase programming from this year’s consumer electronics fair IFA onwards. It will also broadcast a large number of HD programmes over the Christmas holiday season and start regular HD broadcasts with the 2010 Winter Olympics. The decision to opt for 720p/50 was met with scepticism by the German market. In contrast, the Dutch public broadcasters have chosen for 1080i/25. This decision was taken following viewers’ complaints about the 720p/50 standard that was used last year during the Olympics. The decision to use 720p/50 will also likely cause further confusion on the German market, as the Astra-led HD+ platform has chosen 1080i/25 as its standard.

December start for Freeview HD
High definition signals will come to UK digital terrestrial television on December 2 with the conversion of the Winter Hill transmitter that serves Manchester and Liverpool. It will be followed by a retrospective upgrade of the regions that have already made the switch. Graham Plumb, head of distribution technology, BBC Operations Group, said that although November had been originally stated as the launch date for Freeview HD, it was subsequently realised that Multiplex B that will be used for the transmissions would not switch over until December 2. Progress is also being made on the rollout of Freeview HD in certain areas ahead of digital switchover. Crystal Palace, which covers the whole of London, will be upgraded in December and another four main transmitters will be upgraded in the first half of 2010.

BBC revaluates HD output
The BBC is to widen the output of its BBC HD channel across an increasing number of genres. In a keynote speech to the HD Masters conference in London, Danielle Nagler Head of BBC HD, said that while documentaries such as Planet Earth allowed glimpses of animal behaviour that could not be physically achieved, viewers were demanding more. “Our audiences are telling us clearly that we can’t box HD neatly into a limited number of genres. They instinctively recognise that HD can transform everything that we make for television,” said Nagler. Over the past year BBC HD has broadened its schedule across children’s, sport, current affairs, entertainment and drama. However, there have been casualties, such as the Chelsea Flower Show that received no HD coverage this year.

HD+ platform will be prepaid
SES-Astra will not be involved with subscription management of the new HD+ platform. The service will only be sold on a prepaid basis in retail, with the possibility to extend the viewing window in a number of ways. When the HD+ platform launches this autumn, satellite receivers with HD+ certification will be in the shops. This could include receivers that have CI Plus capability, but CI Plus is not part of the HD+ specifications. It is the intention to use Nagravision as the CA system. These decisions come at the same time as Sky Deutschland is rolling out its new service, with the platform instructing dealers and installers to supply only HD satellite receivers to new customers. It remains to be seen if such sets will be compatible with the HD+ platform. HD+ will initially offer RTL and Vox, but more broadcasters are expected to come on board.

Dutch DMB service to launch in The Hague
Dutch Mobiele TV Nederland (MTVNL) will launch its DMB service in The Hague before the end of the year, with a nationwide rollout planned in 2010. The new mobile TV service will be in competition with the incumbent KPN’s Mobiel TV service, which launched in May 2008 using the DVB-H standard. Using the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting standard, MTVNL will launch a bouquet of channels. The fledgling mobile TV broadcasters won the licence earlier this year. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where DMB and DVB-H will launch in competition with each other.

Digea to host Greek commercial DTT
Digea has been officially named as the DTT network provider for the seven main Greek private TV channels (Mega, ANT1, Alpha, Alter, Star, m and Skai). The name is taken from an amalgamation of the words digital and Gaia (meaning Earth). Broadcasts from Digea will begin in the late summer from Kamari – Xilokastro (Peloponnesus), with Thessaloniki – Athens (mid-autumn) and Patras – Larissa to follow. Combined with transmissions from the public broadcaster ERT it is estimated that 60% of the population will be covered by early 2010. Digea will broadcast in DVB-T/MPEG-4, with ERT shortly expected to upgrade from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4.

BSkyB told to pay ITV appeal costs
The Competition Appeal Tribunal has ordered BSkyB to pay the legal costs involved in its struggle to hold onto its 17.9% stake in ITV. It follows applications made by the Competition Commission, the Secretary of State for Business and Virgin Media for their costs in challenging BSkyB’s judicial review proceedings. In March, BSkyB was awarded the right to appeal against the Competition Commission’s ruling that it should reduce its holding in ITV to a maximum of 7.5%. Should Sky lose in the Court of Appeal it faces a massive writedown on the £940 million (€1.11 billion), or 135p per share it paid in November 2006, compared to today’s 34.75p. At the time ITV was facing a takeover approach from Virgin Media, the former NTL.

Sci Fi in breach over Virgin ad invasion
Sci Fi has been found to be in “serious and significant” breach of its licence conditions after the NBC Universal-owned channel failed to produce a recording of its output. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received a viewer complaint over the volume levels of a commercial broadcast on its Virgin Media feed when compared to those placed adjacent to it. The ASA brought in Ofcom when Sci Fi admitted it did not have a recording of the issue, putting it in breach of Licence Condition 11, requiring broadcasters to retain a recording of their output for up to 60 days after transmission. Sci-Fi has apologised to the regulator, explaining that Virgin itself had inserted the Virgin Media advertisement, having received contractual assurances from Virgin Media that its insertions into the broadcast feed would be fully compliant with regulatory requirements. However, Ofcom says it is a licence requirement that broadcasters retain a copy of the output of all versions that are broadcast, whatever the platform.

Liberty Global increases stake in Telenet
Liberty Global has increased its stake in Telenet through a purchase of 230,000 shares via its subsidiary Binan Investments BV. The deal is worth €3.2 million. Following the transaction, Liberty Global now owns a 50.2% share in the Belgian cable operator. The company paid an average of € 14.07 per share. According to local news reports, the transaction was published on the website of the Belgian financial regulator, the Commissie voor het Bank-, Financie- en Assurantiewezen (CBFA).

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Clover's Week TV faces its Kodak moment Connected TV brings more than just widgets, but are pay-TV companies prepared for competition from the box in the corner, asks Julian Clover?

Sitting in the corner of my living room is an old-fashioned slide projector. My father bought it sometime in the 1960s in order to show the slides that he had taken courtesy of the Eastman Kodak Company. The slides themselves are sitting by the projector and sometime over the next few weeks the memories will be sorted and converted into the digital format, the slides put away, maybe for a final time.

Instead of pulling out the projector the photos will now be displayed on my television, courtesy of Apple TV, actually my first reason for purchasing the product. As Connected TV’s appear on the market it won’t just be photographs that displace linear television viewing. More importantly it gives a further push to on demand television.

By adding the Boxee software to the Apple TV, arguably not the most consumer-friendly process, I have been able to pull in the BBC iPlayer, CNN, MTV and Joost from the comfort of my armchair. We’ll gloss over the fact that an Apple TV update meant I spent an hour installing it all over again. Small wonder that Virgin Media’s TV-delivered version of the iPlayer is doing so well, but with a little more commercialistaion, maybe through Canvas, maybe through something else and you start to see the shift.

What makes Connected TV both an opportunity and a threat is that the television display manufacturers almost seem as if they are dipping a toe in the water of the pay-TV business. If it is possible to order a movie from your television set, then maybe you won’t choose your cable operator, or at least send their ARPU southwards. Maybe the greatest threat is to the kind of proposition put forward by BT Vision, the one which goes, “as you don’t’ watch much television get your TV from us”.

So the environment offered by everyone else has to change in order to compete; and it will be a battle of the environments. The argument used by ITV when it withheld itself from the fledgling Sky Digital was that viewers could always turn back to analogue, the problem was they didn’t, and the broadcaster found a disproportionate erosion of its audience in Sky households. The only time you might really want to leave the broadcaster’s environment is, you guessed it, when the family gathers round to look at the holiday photos.

But of course the pay-TV operator can do that too, using the DLNA and MOCA technologies eschewed by Apple, and making the next generation environments even more compelling. Virgin Media has talked about a fusion of broadband and linear TV channels into a single on-screen portal.

For reasons best known to Sony and Sky my TV set will always switch onto the digital terrestrial channels rather than Sky – I never thought HDMI would leave me longing for a Scart plug – so my starting point is invariably the BBC News Channel. But I know that for sports and movies I need to move along the inputs and this takes me to pay-TV, where I stay. But the very fact I write these columns suggests I am prepared to put up with more than civilian viewers and it is these that make up the real audience.

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