Philip Hunter

Pan European multilingual news channel Euronews has appointed a new chair and CEO for its advisory board.

The departure of CEO Neil Gaydon from PACE, the world’s leading set top maker, followed a year of profit warnings triggered by two natural disasters, the Japanese Tsunami and Thailand floods.

Sky has made a long term commitment to investment in UK content by setting up a fund for British film making that will reach £600 million (almost $1 billion) by 2014.

The European HbbTV hybrid TV standard has incorporated support for HTTP adaptive streaming based on the recently published MPEG-DASH specification in its latest version.

The number of HD channels in Europe increased by 198 during 2011 despite the economic crisis.

The Union played the lead role in founding FOBTV.

French broadcast infrastructure and services company GlobeCast announced at NAB the July 1 launch for the Americas of its OTT service MyGlobeTV.

OTT needs standards like never before to deliver the promised service diversity and flexibility.

Consolidation is in the air for Greece’s TV and telecoms market in the midst of the country’s record breaking slump.

Pace set top boxes, deployed by half the world’s leading pay TV operators, could be a Trojan horse bringing Tivo software into many more TV homes.

Spanish triple play operator Jazztel, and Irish broadband provider Magnet Networks, are the latest to trust OTT for paid TV services.

Europe is promoting integrated production to reduce the cost and complexity of TV Everywhere deployment, and is also working towards improved interaction between producers and audiences.

Consumers in the UK at least are now willing to pay to watch TV on mobile devices if quality is good enough, according to a survey by online streaming and encoding vendor Viadiator.

Although Asia is catching up with Europe in IPTV subscribers it is falling behind in the proportion of broadband homes reached.

TV Numeric, the only company distributing the French basic pay-DTT package, is considering dropping it after failing to gain many subscribers.

Europe has been battling against African and Middle Eastern countries to preserve spectrum, released by the digital dividend, for terrestrial services.

Europe must revise its copyright laws and establish extended collective licensing as part of its move towards a single digital market.

UK culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has promised that the government will be bold both in building infrastructure and easing regulations to promote universal access to premium TV services.

The rush to Internet-delivered multiscreen services is driving innovation and boom in tools for boosting network performance.

The European Broadcast Union (EBU) is urging its member countries to create a single market for digital broadcasting and cinema.

The BBC wants to make high-quality Olympic content widely available on catch up via its iPlayer.