Orange TV, part of the huge France Telecom organisation, has announced that its total European digital TV subscriber base has grown by a massive fifty three per cent to 3.217 million during the past year.

In France, which is of course the key area for France Telecom, Orange TV performed well, showing an incredible forty seven per cent increase in subscribers as at the end of December 2009.

However the French company includes online TV with its satellite subscriber base, which probably has more to do with providing advertisers with full viewer figures rather than any attempt to massage the amount of subscribers that the company has on its books at any one time.

Figures are up generally for Orange TV, with sport and film service users standing at 633,000 compared with 130,000 in 2008, while on demand services increased by 67 per cent to 8.5 million.

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The German pay TV satellite provider Sky Deutschland, which of course is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, is expecting to report a loss for 2010, but for the following year the broadcaster is expecting to see a profit.

Sky Deutschland, which is the country’s largest pay TV operator, will be posting a loss of between 130 million and 170 million Euros for the year 2010.

This will be reversed in the following year but by how much has not been predicted.

The company is in good shape and when it comes to average revenue per customer, the broadcasters is claiming that currently three quarters of its customers are paying in excess of thirty Euros per month.

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Italian public broadcaster RAI has had a long relationship with Eutelsat, but that hasn’t stopped it signing with SES Astra for a new channel launch.

SES Astra says it has signed a capacity agreement with RAI to use capacity from Astra’s 19.2 degrees East orbital position to broadcast its new international channel Yes Italia to a European audience.

The agreement follows successful test broadcasts in 2009 and also includes the delivery of uplink services from Astra’s broadcasting centre in Unterföhring near Munich.

Yes Italia is RAI’s new theme-based channel designed to promote Italy’s historical, artistic and cultural heritage to an audience across Europe.

The channel is managed by RAI’s subsidiary NewCo Rai and is broadcast in Italian with English and Spanish subtitles on a 24/7 basis.

Alexander Oudendijk, CCO at SES Astra, said: “We are very pleased to have signed this agreement with RAI, which marks an important milestone in our strategy to position ourselves as a partner for Italian broadcasters. Following our recent agreement with Milano Teleport, this is now the second commercial agreement we have signed in the Italian market within a relatively short period of time. We are very confident that this positive development will continue, and we look forward to signing additional agreements soon.”

The agreement is part of a larger strategic partnership which was founded to jointly test and develop innovative broadcasting services and interactive applications. In the framework of this agreement, SES Astra has already launched an Astra HD demo channel in cooperation with RAI on its 23.5 degrees East orbital position.

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Spacecom, the Amos satellite fleet operator,  announced that the Amos-5i satellite has reached its 17 degrees East orbital position and has begun commercial service.

With clients from Africa, Europe and the Middle East already on board, the Amos-5i satellite enables Spacecom to start serving the growing African market with C-band and Ku-band capacity.

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The satellite, broadband and phone provider BSkyB has once again defied the recession and posted an increase in revenues and at the same time have been signing up new customers.

If ever a business was recession proof Sky TV would have to be up there with the leaders.

Sky TV is now within sight of the long term goal of a ten million customer base.

During the last three months the company added a further 172,000, taking the total to 9.7 million.

But it is revenues that build a company and BSkyB reports a revenue increase of ten per cent on the year to £2.9 billion.

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Sat4fun wishes all of you a Happy New Year.

The new Freesat set top boxes announced this week by Humax will not only offer the user access to free to view satellite TV through Freesat but, like many of the boxes coming to the market recently, will also offer access to the BBC iPlayer and possibly the ITV Player.

There will be two versions of the Freesat HD receiver, the Foxsat HD2 and the Foxsat HD2R.

Both set top boxes are the same, except the HD2R version includes a 500 Gb hard drive, allowing the user to record one programme while watching another, pause live TV and time shift programming too.

The Humax Foxsat HD series could be a real rival to similar equipment offered by the satellite pay TV provider BSkyB, but with no subscription charges.

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A survey undertaken by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) has revealed that a third of those questioned said they have listened to an Internet radio station.

The poll, conducted in November, questioned 977 UK adults on their listening preferences. The figure of a third extrapolated would represent 17.4 million people who’ve tuned into net radio in this country.

Other tidbits the survey produced include the fact that 8.3 million folks had heard of wi-fi radio.

And 8.1 million have downloaded a podcast, and just over half of this number are regular podcast fans, listening to at least one every week.

Apparently 57% of net radio listeners are men, and 47% are aged between 15 and 34.

The research also found that personalised online radio – such as Spotify or Last.fm – was performing impressively, with 4.5 million listeners, well up from around 3 million a year ago.

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Just as Virgin Media pulls out from its decision to sell the Virgin Media TV channels, it would seem that the BBC Trust has finally given BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial division, the go ahead to purchase the other 50 per cent of UKTV.

UKTV is a joint venture between BBC Worldwide and Virgin Media, with both organisations owning fifty per cent of UKTV.

It is believed that this deal is going to help the troubled broadcaster Channel Four, as BBC Worldwide owning all of UKTV could pave the way for some sort of mini merger between BBC Worldwide and Channel Four.

The problem that Channel Four has, is the other partnerships it has formed, especially one with a certain satellite broadcaster, which could see the firm’s sales teams merged into one.

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Sky Deutschland is making a decisive push into the HD TV satellite market by offering consumers a reasonably priced HD TV Starter box.

Priced at just 199 Euros, the HD TV Starter pack includes the HD set top box and a pre paid HD TV subscription.

There are two different types of starter pack, the DTH satellite reception version and one that can be used in conjunction with a cable TV connection.

The packages include a subscription to all twenty one channels from Sky Welt and Sky Welt Extra, with a further eighteen channels for satellite TV users.

There are seven HD channels covering film and sport within the channels offered.

This is a limited time offer that will end on the 12th January.

HD TV starter packs can be order online or over the phone.

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