This Just In
By Staff -- Multichannel News, 9/9/2007 8:00:00 PM
Items:
Showtime’s 'Californication’ Wins Renewal For Season 2
Westbrook Leaving Posts At Millennium Digital
Ovation Salutes Late Tenor Pavarotti Starting Monday
DirecTV Aims HD DVR At Home Theater Installs
Sci Fi Net Hunts 'Ghosts’ On Halloween Again, Live
Motorola Sees Surge in IPTV Box Sales
Clearing the air
Showtime’s 'Californication’ Wins Renewal For Season 2
New York — Showtime has renewed its freshman series Californication for a second season.
The 12-episode comedy series, which stars former The X-Files star David Duchovny as a struggling writer living on the wild side of life, is one of the highest-rated series on Showtime, averaging 1.9 million cumulative viewers a week during its first four weeks on air, according to Showtime executives.
Additionally, the series is holding onto 90% of the audience from its lead-in, comedy series Weeds.
“Californication is a home run for us,” Showtime Entertainment president Robert Greenblatt said in a release. “We haven’t launched a first-year show this strongly out of the gate before, and it caps an extraordinary 12 months that’s included the launch of Dexter, The Tudors, Brotherhood and This American Life.”
Westbrook Leaving Posts At Millennium Digital
St. Louis — Millennium Digital Media Systems said Friday that chairman and chief strategic officer Kelvin Westbrook was resigning as of Oct. 5. The cable provider said Westbrook indicated he will be pursuing his public board activities as well as other business and personal interests.
“We thank Kelvin for his years of outstanding service to the company,” CEO Bill Shreffler said in a statement. “His contributions over the years have been critical to the formation and success of Millennium, and we wish him the very best in all future endeavors.”
Westbrook, who was one of the founders of the 120,000-subscriber cable firm a decade ago, had been president until the firm hired Shreffler, a former Charter Communications executive, a year ago.
Ovation Salutes Late Tenor Pavarotti Starting Monday
Santa Monica, Calif. — Ovation TV said it will pre-empt its lineup on Monday, Sept. 10, to pay tribute to late opera icon Luciano Pavarotti by presenting the operatic star in some of his finest performances. The day-long tribute begins at 8 a.m. Monday and ends Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 4 a.m.
Scheduled to air are: Pavarotti: The Best is Yet to Come, a 1995 Italian documentary; Great Tenor Performances with performances by leading tenors Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Roberto Alagna; and Aida, featuring Pavarotti, in his vocal prime, as Radames opposite Margaret Price in Sam Wanamaker’s landmark 1981 production.
DirecTV Aims HD DVR At Home Theater Installs
Los Angeles — DirecTV hopes to broaden its appeal to home-theater installers with a high-definition digital video recorder set-top — called the HR21 Pro — whose key features include storage for up to 100 hours of MPEG-4 HD content, twice the capacity of the operator’s current HR20 HD DVR.
The box, manufactured by Samsung Electronics, is scheduled to begin production toward the end of October. Distributor and retail pricing has not yet been set, according to DirecTV director of public relations Robert Mercer.
In TV ads and other marketing efforts, DirecTV has touted its forthcoming lineup of HD content as outstripping cable’s existing capacity. The direct-broadcast satellite provider offers 10 national HD channels today (plus “NFL Sunday Ticket” out-of-market pro football games) but expects to deliver 100 by the end of 2007.
The HR21 Pro unit offers a regular High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connection, as well as an “optical HDMI” transmitter port that supports Intel’s HDCP Digital Light Interface specification to encrypt HD video content for installations of 50 feet or more from a TV set. DirecTV claimed this feature is unique in the industry.
The Pro box also has gold-plated electrical connectors and a brushed-aluminum, rack-mountable case for optional mounting in a professional rack or tabletop. The unit also includes a pair of low-noise fans.
Sci Fi Net Hunts 'Ghosts’ On Halloween Again, Live
New York — Sci Fi Channel said it will again send its Ghost Hunters out on a live quest for the paranormal on Oct. 31, otherwise known as All Hallows Eve.
The three-year-old series — starring Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, who are plumbers by day and volunteer paranormal researchers by night — attempted a six-hour live investigation last Halloween.
Sci Fi declared the results a ratings success: broadcast from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., it delivered more than 1.4 million viewers in the first hour alone. In July, the series wrapped its best season ever in all key demographic categories, averaging a 1.5 household rating and 2 million total viewers across six episodes.
The 2007 Ghost Hunters Live investigation will take place from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. at the notoriously haunted Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Ky. New episodes of Ghost Hunters return to Sci Fi on Wednesday, Sept. 26.
Ghost Hunters Live concludes Sci Fi’s “13 Days of Halloween” marathon, which starts on Oct. 19 and features 250 hours of horror and sci-fi movies, miniseries and originals.
Motorola Sees Surge in IPTV Box Sales
Horsham, Pa. — Motorola shipped its 2 millionth Internet Protocol set-top box, less than six months after hitting the 1 million mark, and teamed up with Microsoft to test its video-encoding systems with the software giant’s IP-television platform.
The equipment vendor cited Swedish telecommunications provider TeliaSonera as having deployed the 2 millionth IP set-top, a VIP1510, as part of a 150,000-unit order. Motorola noted that it recognized a portion of the revenue from the TeliaSonera deal in previous quarters.
Separately, Motorola said it joined the formal interoperability testing program for Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV platform.
Through the Mediaroom Interoperability and Qualification Lab (IQ Lab) program, Motorola verified interoperability and compliance of its SE-5100 High Definition MPEG-4 AVC encoder with Microsoft’s IPTV software platform.
Motorola entered the IP set-top business in early 2006, with the acquisition of Swedish manufacturer Kreatel Communications AB. Kreatel’s existing customers included TeliaSonera, as well as Spain’s Telefonica and Holland’s KPN.
Other IPTV-related acquisitions by Motorola include Tut Systems, a provider of IP headend equipment, and Modulus Video, a developer of MPEG-4 encoding technologies.
Clearing the air
An August 27 article (“No Minor Market,” page 14) mistakenly identified the Hispanic kids’ network La Familia Cosmovision as Las Familia Cosmo.
