Granada has completed its acquisition of Border Television from Capital Radio for £50.5m, reinforcing the media group’s position as ITV’s leading shareholder.Granada, which agreed to buy Border from Capital last April (see Granada Agrees To Buy Border TV Assets), now owns six of the 14 ITV regional licences and has increased its share of the… Continue reading Granada Completes Border Deal
Use of the internet in the US is starting to eat into consumers’ use of other media, with 20-24% of respondents to a Content Intelligence survey claiming to have cancelled subscriptions to magazines since they started using the Net. The survey shows that the Web rapidly becomes the favourite source for both personal and special… Continue reading Net Usage Hits Other Media, With Newspapers Least Affected
Go Racing, the consortium which owns the rights to British horseracing, has renamed itself “attheraces” and rebranded with a new corporate identity.The consortium, made up of by BSkyB, Channel 4 and Arena Leisure, was forced to rename itself after discovering that the domain name, ‘Goracing’ was unavailable and could not be used for the company’s… Continue reading Go Racing Rebrands
GWR Group has restructured its internet operations in a move which will make annual cost savings of around £1.3 million. The move will also see a restriction in the ‘speed of development’ of koko.com, the group’s regional information and enterainment portal. GWR says it will now concentrate resources on its localised directories and radio station… Continue reading 46 Jobs Go As GWR Restructures Internet Operations
Following the release by BSkyB of Sky+, a new integrated personal video recorder, Datamonitor foresees rapid uptake of new set top boxes across Europe. Datamonitor predicts that by 2005, 48% of set top boxes will include PVR technology. 42% of households with digital TV are also forecast to have more than one set top box… Continue reading A New Era For Set-Top Boxes Dawns, Says Datamonitor
The completion date for TV’s “digital revolution” may remain unclear, but the democracy that a multi-channel world brings is already in evidence in TV viewing patterns. The audience has not changed much in size, but the traditional strongholds of ITV and BBC1 have seen their share drift downwards in recent years, with the main beneficiaries… Continue reading Feature: Losses And Gains In TV
Bidding for the four-year ITV news contract closes today and ITN will be challenged for the first time by the Channel 3 News consortium.ITN has provided news on the ITV network for 46 years and will face competition for the contract, which begins in 2003 and is thought to be worth in excess of £150m,… Continue reading Bidding Closes For ITV News Contract
Emap Performance has closed its rock, rap and lifestyle magazine, Kingsize, after just four issues.The magazine, aimed at the youth market, was launched in March to fill the gap left by the closure of indie music magazine Select, which closed in January after sales dropped (see Launches And Closures: Press).Kingsize, which had a cover price… Continue reading Emap Closes Kingsize
Cinema admissions in June reached 9.4m and were up 21% on the same period last year, according to The Cinema Advertising Association (CAA).The box office soared during June with cinema admissions averaging 2.18 million a week. This was largely due to Pearl harbour, which took £10.4m, throughout the month, making it June’s top film. Animated… Continue reading Cinema Reaches For The Sky In June
National commercial speech station talkSPORT is to be allowed to provide a separate football programme for Scotland and Northern Ireland. The station asked to establish the “split” service in order to provide phone-ins and coverage which covered the Scottish Premier League rather than the English one.The station is capable of broadcasting in this way due… Continue reading TalkSPORT Allowed To Split Scottish Football
