The Sci-Fi Channel will become a 7-day-a week service for British Sky Broadcasting subscribers in the United Kingdom and Ireland, broad-casting in extended hours set between 8:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.
These extra programming hours correspond with the increased Sci-Fi fall schedule. The fall schedule will include cable and satellite premiers of such programs as the Dark Skies series and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Sci-Fi will also debut Planet Mirth and "Deepwater Black", an action/adventure series aimed at the younger audiences.
A contract has been obtained by McDonnel Douglas to launch Telenor of Norway's Thor III communications satellite. The launch will use Delta II expendable rockets to boost Thor III into orbit.
Thor III will utilize 14 active Ku-band transponders to beam program-ming to Central and Eastern Europe as well as Scandinavian countries.
Thor III will join it's elder sibling satellites already in orbit, Thor I and Thor II, over the skies of Europe in July of 1998.
United News & Media is said to be pondering the thought of leaping into the world of cable television to become a rival to Cable and Wireless Communications.
United News and Media's move to cable t.v. has the potential of bringing forth another competitor for BskyB, a News Corp. backed multichannel service that provides programming to more than 6 million subscribers in Ireland and the U.K.
If the plan goes through, United will consume a large minority stake in a cable company that was created by a merger between Telewest and NTL.
The Indian government is con-sidering a complete ban on satellite programming which would scratch out Rupert Murdock's plan to launch India Sky Broadcasting, a DTH satellite TV service.
Murdock had already begun establishing the service by hiring around 150 people to work as staff, creating uplink facilities from Hong Kong, and leasing 7 transponders on PAS-4.
The ruling will be challenged in court.
The PPV Anti-Theft Task Force is getting ready to challenge several publishing houses that advertise cable descrambler boxes otherwise known as "black boxes".
One of the companies the task force is singling out is Times Mirror Co., part owner of the Outdoor Life Network and former cable operator. Times Mirror carries black box ads in many of it's publications, including Field and Stream, Popular Science, Golf Magazine and more.
Other companies expected to be approached by the PPV anti-theft task force are Hachette Filipacchi Magazines Inc. as well as The Hearst Corp.
It is believed that, if the com-panies named do not stop running black box ads, an attempt on a boycott on the magazines will be the next step.
Microsoft has been granted permission by the Justice Department to purchase WebTV Networks in a $425 million deal.
Through intense investigation, the Justice Department came to the conclusion that the purchase would not breach antitrust laws and decided to let the deal take place.
The Justice Department stated that several companies who par-ticipate in consumer electronics and or the computer industry have, or plan on obtaining similar, com-petitive products and alternative technologies.
Web TV allows you to access the internet with a specially designed set-top box with built in television connections.
Spice has joined forces with Princeton Media Group to form a magazine that will be both printed and on the internet.
The content of the magazine will include adult entertainment as well as program guides based on Spice Direct's two cable TV and satellite channels, Spice and Adam & Eve.
Spice Inside magazine will pro-vide the subscriber with information on various adult magazines, video and cable entertainment.
If having access to numerous out of market NFL games wasn't enough, the NFL has added another channel for your pigskin pleasure. The new channel, "Sunday Snap", will offer the subscriber not only one extra game, but four extra games at the same time along with real-time updates on the whole NFL, all this on a single screen at no extra cost.
In order to view four games at once the screen is being divided into four separate sections. The real time updates which will roll across the bottom of the screen, will include statistics, the time clock, field position, possession of the ball, and scores from across the league. The text for these updates is said to be large enough to read even from a twenty inch screen TV.
Sunday snap will be aired by the NFL on both DSS and C-Band.
Tele-Communications Inc. has felt the push of the growing DBS services by losing nearly 90,000 subscribers in the second quarter alone. Now TCI says its their turn to push back.
Leo Hindery, president of TCI, made a promise during a press conference in early August not to lose any more TCI customers to DBS. He continued to add that his company knows how to market their pro-gramming, they just haven't done it.
Hindery is not taking this DBS challenge lightly. He plans on spending around $100 million on marketing throughout the end of the year. If so that would be a $86 million increase from the first quarter spendings of $14 million.
Despite the loss of subscribers TCI has reported a 16 percent increase in monetary earnings with the help of higher rates and heavily watched pay-per-view events.
The Public Broadcasting Service along with the Washington based lobbying group for the United States' 203 public stations are requesting that federal regulators grant them more flexibility with commercial programming once extra channels are gained through new digital technology.
New digital technology gives stations the ability to broadcast on as many as six channels at the same time.
One idea is to lease out excess capacity to commercial broadcasters leaving them free to advertise as they choose. Another idea is to sell viewer subscriptions to a channel that would offer all of the regular PBS shows without fund raisers and pledge drives.
PBS's goal is to find a substitute for the lost federal money which accounts for 14 percent of their funding.
One hurdle that the Public Broadcasting Service needs to get over is a 1967 law that prohibits non-commercial operators from using airwaves for commercial pur-poses.
The FCC is looking to the public for their opinion and is expected to make a ruling by the end of this year.
The U.S. Copyright Office has sent a report to Congress stating that the home satellite industry should have a mandatory license for retrans-mission of local broadcast signals as long as the cable industry is required to have one.
Satellite's license will expire on 12/31/99 while Cable's license has no expiration.
The Copyright Office recom-mended the Congress take on a "red zone/green zone" approach. This would allow satellite carriers to retranmit a network affiliate feed to subscribers outside of a local market area The Copyright Office also said testing picture quality is not a suf-ficient way to determine whether or not an individual household is out of market.
A major concern of the National Association of Broadcasters was if the policy were to be adopted it would incapacitate local programming by easily allowing distant broadcast signals to land on roof tops anywhere. They also strongly disagreed with the idea that white area protection should be abandoned.
In mid August, a Digital Broad-cast Satellite receiver on a single chip was introduced by CommQuest Tech-nologies Inc. The new single-chip receiver, CQT6020, was made for use in set top boxes and satellite PC applications.
A single CQT6020 chip allows the user to access DSS, DBS and single channel per carrier(SCPC) applications without changing any components.
A high powered telecommun-ications satellite built by Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) for Mabuhay Philippines Satellite Corporation (MPSC), was successfully launched by a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on August 20.The high powered satellite, Agila2, will carry 30 C-band and 24 Ku band transponders that can be combined to 12 high-power transponders at 220 watts.
Agila 2 will give MPSC the power to transmit over 190 channels of digital programming to cable companies and home satellite dishes as well as operate 50,000 two-way phone conversations at the same time.
Fox Sports, FX and fXM, all owned by News Corp., plan to spend a combined $3.5 million for digital broadcast equipment furnished by NDS Americas, another company owned by News Corp.
This transaction is said to be the first step in the process of con-verting Fox's existing analog signal into a digital format.
With this new equipment Fox will have the ability to transmit 8 channels from a single transponder.