In what is usually a slow news period, dealmakers remained busy during the holiday season.

Spain’s largest media company Prisa announced it would like to take complete control of pay TV operator Sogecable and acquire the 50% it doesn’t already own. The proposed deal values Sogecable at about $5.7 billion.

Mobile operator SFR plans to pay $6.6 billion for the 60% France’s second largest broadband operator Neuf Cegetel. SFR already has a 40% stake.

Carlyle will pay $1.5 billion for a 35% stake in French cable operator Numericable from Civen, which will retain 35% of the MSO.

In Russia, mobile operator VimpelCom is planning to pay about $4.3 billion for Golden Telecom, which owns IPTV provider Corbina Telecom.

Also in Russia, broadcaster CTC Media is buying two production companies Costafilm and Soho Media for about $50 million.

To strengthen its TV and IPTV business, Ericsson acquired TV consultant and systems integration company HyC Group in Spain.

But, Bertelsmann has reversed an early December announcement and said it has no immediate plans to buy the 10% of RTL Group that it doesn’t own.

Regulators were also surprisingly busy in the run-up to the New Year.

As expected, British regulators ruled that BSkyB must either sell its 17.9% stake in ITV or cut it to less than 7.5% and agree not to take a seat on the ITV board. Thanks to ITV’s slumping stock price, a forced sale could produce a significant loss for BSkyB.

In the ongoing premium phone scandal in the U.K., regulators slapped Channel 4 with a $2.2 million fine for cheating viewers of Richard & Judy and the Deal or No Deal program who called premium lines.

German TV pioneer Leo Kirch continues his comeback. After winning rights to German soccer in 2007, Kirch now appears close to settling his $2.4 billion lawsuit against Deutsche Bank. Kirch has long blamed comments about his poor credit standing by Deutsche Bank’s chairman for the collapse of his media holdings in 2002.

Australian regulators are now proposing that analogue broadcast signals be cut off in all major cities by 2009, with the final transition to digital occurring by 2013.

In Canada, regulators have finally approved CanWest’s takeover of Alliance Atlantis.

But Canada’s public broadcaster CBC is getting out of the international program sales business and has inked a deal for Fireworks International to handle its library and new product.

In the increasingly competitive Russian pay TV landscape, National Telecommunications announced plans to launch an IPTV service in Moscow sometime in early 2008 and a new Russian DTH service Russian TV Time has begun trials.

Also in the booming Russian market, Disney has concluded a major deal for its films and TV programs with Channel One in Russia. The studio calls the deal its largest to date in the market and notes that their revenues from Russia have increased by 400% in the last three years.

In the on-demand sector, Telefónica has launched Terra TV in Spain; the free ad-supported VOD service allows users to access TV programs over the internet.

BSkyB has inked deals with Paramount and Warner Bros. that will make their films available on its PC download service, Sky Anytime. The recently relaunched service now has content from all six major U.S. studios.

In Germany, the country’s largest cable operator Kabel Deutschland has started a trial of a 100 Mbps high-speed Internet service in Hamburg.

Also in Germany, pay TV operator Premiere has shut down its international DTH bouquets Premiere Turkish-XL and Premiere Turkish.

In Israel, cable operator Hot and DTH provider Yes have launched HDTV packages.

In Japan, Google will provide search and e-mail service for mobile phone customers of NTT DoCoMo.

Several new research studies provide good news for vendors as they move into 2008. Worldwide sales of IPTV equipment grew 23% in the third quarter to $682.5 million, according to Infonetics Research. A new study from In-Stat predicts that global sales of headend equipment to telcos will hit $732 million by 2011.

But a new report from iSuppli Corp. indicates that IPTV in China is progressing slower than expected. Operators signed up about 846,000 subscribers at the end of 2007, lower than the 1.3 million they had projected.

A separate study by Chinese regulators has found that the market now has 23.65 million digital cable subscribers at the end of the November 2007, an 81.3% increase in the last year.

On the tech front, Ecuador TV Cable has deployed Volicon Observer system to scan and monitor its channel lineup.

In Taiwan, Markwell announced that it will use UTStarcom’s RollingStream solution for its IPTV offering.

Bhavneet Singh
Managing director and senior VP, Emerging Markets
MTVNI

 

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