Video Age International articles from January 1999

Video Age International archives from January 1999

Latin TV market in facts & figures.
January 1, 1999... At the recently concluded Promax Latin America conference in Miami, CBS TeleNoticias President Francisco de la Torre delivered the keynote speech, "Television Marketing in the New Millennium." Making use of charts for his slide presentation and...

A television balancing act: one group juggles English language and Spanish-language affiliates in the same market.
January 1, 1999... A little more than a year ago, the Gulf-California Broadcast Company introduced a new station, KUNA-TV, in Palm Springs, California, alongside its existing station, ABC affiliate KESQ-TV. When we realized that Palm Springs - like the rest...

My two cents.(France's television broadcasting industry)(Editorial)
January 1, 1999... In France, producers and distributors are up in arms over yet another proposal to change that country's TV system. The latest proposal is that commercial time on the state-owned TV networks be reduced from the current 12 minutes per hour to...

Greek TV fined.(Skai TV and Antenna TV)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Greece's National Radio and Television Council has levied large fines against two private television stations for violating that country's TV ethics code. The council claimed that both stations broadcast programs which capitalized on human...

PROMAX in Miami got Latins moving.(PROMAX Latin Conference, North Miami Beach, Florida)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... More than 500 television promotion executives from Latin America, the U.S. and Canada attended the first PROMAX Latin conference in November at the Sheraton Bal Harbour Hotel in North Miami Beach. A mix of 14 fast-paced seminars and...

International Council gets respect.(International Emmy Awards)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Top-level TV executives from all over the world convened on November 23 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York to welcome the nominees for the International Council's International Emmy Awards. More than 300 executives attended the...

Four countries adopt ATSC standard.(Advanced Television Systems Committee)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... This past October, Argentina became the first country in South America to formally adopt the U.S. ATSC standard for digital terrestrial television broadcasts. Taiwan adopted the standard last June; Canada and South Korea followed suit in...

U.N. TV forum deals with audio archives.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... Approximately 550 people from 45 countries participated in the third annual United Nations TV Forum. The event, held at the U.N. headquarters in New York on November 19, featured 60 presentations that attracted top-level media executives from...

Research co. dashes HDTV dreams.(Forrester Research; high-definition television)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... High definition television (HDTV) will fail to offer broadcasters, cable operators and TV manufacturers new revenue sources, according to a new report by Massachusetts-based Forrester Research. The report, titled "HDTV Dreams, SDTV Realities,"...

Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.(Review)
January 1, 1999... Carl Hiaasen, a novelist and the author of Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World (The Library of Contemporary Thought, Ballantine, 83 pp.), admits that he imagines the worst of Disney, even when it isn't true. In 1997, when a rare black...

Dreaming of Web streaming? Broadcast.com explains how to get your program on the Net.
January 1, 1999... If, like many others in the entertainment field, you're wondering what impact the Internet is going to have on television down the line, you may have thought of putting some of your programs on the Web, just to test the waters... and hedge your...

Webcasting: a necessity for broadcasters.
January 1, 1999... Webcasting is the next trend in both the Internet and television industries. The quality of Webcasting has improved so much that the addition of QuickTime files (files that need to be down-loaded onto a computer before they can be watched) to a...

Canal Plus: arrogance in red.
January 1, 1999... The French pay-TV service Canal Plus has announced nine-month financial results, and they're tinted red. Canal Plus' total revenues are up 21 percent over the same period the year before, for a total of roughly $2 billion. This growth can...

Byzantine Italian pay-TV scenario explained.
January 1, 1999... It is clear that Rupert Murdoch wants to be a player in the European pay-TV arena, an arena controlled by France's Canal Plus. It is also clear that Murdoch's various attempts to penetrate Europe have been met with a web of political and...

The media reflects on mergers.
January 1, 1999... Exposing a Form of Neo-Marxism? As often as we read about the importance of mergers and acquisitions, we see articles about the danger of these M&As. From one side, we hear about the merits of synergy, vertical integration, core business...

Foreign money, station groups, cheapies.(includes related article on syndicated programming and reality-based TV)(TV program syndication)
January 1, 1999... As program syndicators and network affiliates prepared to gather for their yearly dance at NATPE, some of the industry's top executives offered their insight on upcoming trends in television syndication, on both the creative and business...

The euro approaches: run for cover, or rush to convert?
January 1, 1999... On January 1, 1999, 11 European currencies were officially replaced by a central monetary unit called the euro. As the European Union kicks off the millennium with this euro, international television distribution companies are being forced to...

Rating TV and film events around the globe.
January 1, 1999... This is the fourth time Video Age has turned its hand to compiling a list of important markets and festivals. Our reporters drew on their first-hand knowledge to describe most of the events, and trusted eyewitnesses filled us in on those events...