—Zodiak Entertainment: Marco Ferrari (pictured) has been named chief digital officer of Zodiak Entertainment, a London- and Paris-based TV producer, as part of the company’s strategy to develop more digital content. He will also continue to hold his current job as president and MD of Neo Network, the digital arm of Zodiak. Zodiak is part of Italy’s De Agostini group and is reportedly in talks to acquire RDF Media, which would create the world’s third-largest TV production company behind Endemol and RTL’s FremantleMedia.

—HTC: The mobile handset maker has appointed Vladimir Malugin as its new marketing director for the EMEA region. HTC has been ramping up its own marketing profile in the region as it releases more of its own-branded devices.

—mFlow: The digital music service has appointed Kerry Newman is its brand manager and Pete Trainor as product development director. Newman had worked for Warner Music as strategic marketing manager, and Trainor was head of user experience at marketing agency Tequila London. Trainor had already been a consultant for mFlow prior to his full-time appointment. (Via MusicWeek.)

—Guardian: As part of Guardian News & Media’s voluntary redundancy program, Hildegunn Soldal, who had been executive producer of multimedia, is leaving. Soldal had been with the Guardian website since 2002. (Via Guardian.)

The Filter, the Peter Gabriel-backed digital entertainment recommendation site, has appointed Doug Merrill, former CIO of Google (NSDQ: GOOG), to its board of directors, as it ramps up its strategy to white-label its recommendation engine to third-party content sites. The Filter says it has two big deals that it will announce later this month, for a customer each in Europe and the U.S.. Merrill’s appoint is a non-executive position.

The company, which first launched in 2008 as a standalone consumer service, has been offering recommendation services to other content sites for the better part of a year now. It’s racked up several high-profile customers in the process: Sony (NYSE: SNE) Music Entertainment (which uses it in its music player MyPlay); online video rental site DVDPost; ThePlatform and Evolver.net, along with We7, the Gabriel-backed music site. The Filter also says it “collaborates” with Nokia (NYSE: NOK), presumably on Nokia Music, although a spokesperson would not confirm this directly.

Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) still sees value in local newspapers, even if Guardian Media Group doesn’t. It’s buying GMG Regional Media - with its 32 newspapers and websites - for £44.8 million ($70 million), in a deal that had been expected and shows the very different strategies of the two companies...

The cash price is actually just £7.4 million, but Trinity is paying £37.4 million to get out of GMG Regional Media’s existing long-term print contract (after all, it already has its own presses). The announcement says the group made a zero operating profit for the 2009 full year and has gross assets of £8.7 million.

It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad - not only will the former run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different.

So publishers who have already found a degree of incremental revenue from iPhone are now looking for another increment from its bigger brother…

In what could become a significant case in content companies’ battle against piracy in Europe, Italy’s supreme court has ruled that ISPs in the country must block access to Pirate Bay.

Italy had tried to block the Bit Torrent tracker in 2008 by issuing a decree from the deputy public prosecutor. But that failed miserably: the site changed its IP address and the ISPs redirected users to the IFPI’s site. Meanwhile, the Court of Bergamo, on an appeal from Pirate Bay itself, ruled that foreign websites could not be censored for alleged copyright infringement. That meant the block was temporarily lifted. This most recent ruling from the supreme court overturns that decision.

The UK government politely refused some of the boldest proposed late changes to the Digital Economy Bill, as the House Of Lords finally finished debating the bill on Tuesday night.

Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas had proposed guaranteeing rights to format-shift, link to websites, fair-use protection for search engines and a fairer deal for artists whose material is used by rightsholders that take equity in online services like Spotify (see our full story detail yesterday).

But the government’s Lord Bryan Davies, who is steering the bill through Lords committee stage, briefly rejected the whole shebang in a late-night debate, forcing Lucas to withdraw his amendments.

Hark, the herald angels sing! Total UK ad spend will rise this autumn, after nine consecutive quarters of annual decline, according to an Advertising Association and WARC forecast.

The rise is modest - Q3 2010 is predicted to be 2.8 percent up from the year before. But it’s heartening after last year, when total ad spend fell 12.7 percent from 2008 in the worst ad recession since 1982, according to the AA and WARC.

—Euro Winter Olympics Coverage: The European Broadcasting Union is streaming Winter Olympics coverage free through its “Vancouver Live” portal, including selected events in HD for the first time. The EBU claims that it will have the most extensive online coverage in Europe, aggregating feeds from 30 member broadcasters, six EBU live feeds and an Olympic news channel adding another 3,000 hours of live event coverage. The EBU’s Beijing LIve portal delivered 22 million streams.

—Sky ITV (LSE: ITV) stake: BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) has sold a 10.4 percent share in broadcaster ITV for £196 million ($307 million), following a two-year battle with the UK regulator over its stake in the company. The figure represents a loss of about £348 million ($544 million) compared to the price Sky paid originally for that share. Sky said in a release it that intends to keep a remaining 7.5 percent stake “and to remain a committed shareholder of ITV,” which recently appointed a new chief executive.

—VOD in Sweden: The Modern Times Group has launched a subscription-based video-on-demand service in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Viasat OnDemand has live sports, TV and films over the Internet with content from CBS (NYSE: CBS) and Warner Bros.; (NYSE: TWX) as well as catch-up TV for free channels on the Viasat satellite service. Packages range from $6.60 to $27 per month. MTG launched the service on the same day it acquired a 50 percent stake in a Russian satellite pay-TV operator, Raduga TV, from owners Continental Media, for an undisclosed sum. (Via C21.net.)

—.Fox UK MD leaves: Federica Aperio is stepping down as the managing director of .Fox Networks, the UK sales and ad network for Fox International Channels (FIC). Sales director Francis Turner will now oversee the day-to-day running of the business. This is the second executive departure from .Fox in a month after Phil Cooper, the chief executive, resigned in January. (Via MediaWeek.)

—AOL (NYSE: AOL) UK sales: Three new roles have been added to the UK sales team. Toby Morris is the new head of premium sales; Robert Blake is now head of performance sales; and Andrew Moore is head of agency sales. These are all internal appointments; the three will report to Kate Burns, head of AOL in Europe. AOL says the moves were made to improve links with agencies and clients across its network of sites. (Via emailed release.)

—ITV: The broadcaster is looking to hire 30 new tech staff as it develops new applications and partnerships. It is recruiting in business technology consulting, marketing, online sales, TV production and post-production, and solution delivery. (Via Guardian.)

—Scottish News Consortium: Mark Wood is the new chairman of a consortium bidding for the government’s regional news pilot in Scotland. The Scottish News Consortium includes DC Thomson, Herald & Times Group, Johnston Press, and Tinopolis. Wood is a non-executive director at Future Publishing (LSE: FUTR) and had been the chief executive of ITN until March 2009. (Release)

Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis opened Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference with an extensive report about the revenue possibilities presented to hyperlocal sites. Amid an flurry of stats that aimed to show that hyperlocal sites can attract thousands of dollars in revenue with just a s small support staff, his primary point was that sites in general need to do more than just sell ads and post news items. The need to sell services, including optimizing advertisers’ web presence across search and directories sites, as well as on social media and the mobile web. In terms of content, Jarvis rejects the notion that there’s too much content on the web, which many observers has said dilutes the value of major publishers’ ad sales. He pointed the value of establishing networks that filter the huge waves of content as the best way for media companies to recapture revenue. (Jarvis has posted an outline of his presentation, here.)

South Africa’s Naspers and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies (DST) are in talks to pool their Polish social networks Gadu-Gadu and Nasza-klasa.pl, according to Russian business daily Kommersant, citing “a source close to the deal”.

Naspers, which owns Gadu-Gadu outright, is reportedly doing due diligence on Forticom, the DST-owned social network operator that bought its 75 percent stake in Nasza-Klasa.pl for $92 million in 2008. We’ve got queries in with both sides - DST tells us: “We do not comment on any market speculation”