After years of effort and speculation, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has pieced together nearly 40 broadcast services from around the world to boost the on-demand programming available through Xbox Live. It took a shift in strategy to make room for broadcasters like the BBC, the trend toward authentication to bring on…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) at the moment gets the vast majority of its revenues from its huge advertising business, but today we saw two examples of how its trying to diversify for a later day. It has bought the German Groupon clone Daily Deal and it has started rolling out its…

Many consumers were never completely sure of the correct way to pronounce it, and it has had mixed success as a household name synonymous with cloud-based entertainment, so it comes as not too much of a surprise to hear that Sony (NYSE: SNE) has now dropped the Qriocity brand. Instead,…

The idea of social networks as a place to listen to and share music is one that MySpace (NSDQ: NWS) should have owned. But its gradual decline has left the field open for others to take up the opportunity. The European social network Netlog is partnering with the music streaming…

Despite the big stories about the iPad 2 selling out in the U.S., and the question marks over how events in Japan might affect consumer electronics supplies, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is going ahead with its scheduled launch of the iPad 2 outside the U.S.

Another chapter in the continuing consolidation mobile service agencies, and the growth of one agency in particular, the Mobile Interactive Group. Today, the UK outfit announced that it would be buying Golden Bytes to extend its operations into the Netherlands and Belgium. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Publishers in Europe are up in arms over Apple’s decision to reject Sony’s Reader app. They say Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has left them “confused” with their charging policies, and are now gearing up to meet in London later this month to plan what to do next.

What is Apple’s preferred big idea for iPad news and magazine subscriptions? We don’t know - a possible newsstand announcement may have been pushed back with the joint The Daily announcement, or scheduled with an upcoming iPad 2 announcement. But what we do know is, some publishers this week voiced…

The price of knowing what people are saying about your brand or company right now is high right now. Which would explain why Brussels-based social media buzz aggregator Attentio has received €525,000 (£316,000) in funding from Brussels Regional Investment , Belgium’s regional investment group covering the city (via Techcrunch).

As its hype curve rises and grows around the world, music service Spotify is locking out eager, enterprising users from outside the six countries in which it has launched so far. The service is only supposed to be available in Sweden, the UK, France, Spain, Finland and Norway, but users…

—The Filter: Peter Gabriel-backed music recommendation technology developer The Filter is moving into the DVD market. The company has signed up to provide Belgian online DVD home rental service DVDPost with its own movie recommendation widget. DVDPost has been running in France and the Benelux countries since 2002 and has…

A couple of small deals to prove that funding still goes on despite the crunch: Belgian ad creation software developer Specle has won funding of £150,000 in a first round led my Avonmore Developments, which previously invested in Groupspaces. Private investors Simon and Dale Murray also the join the round…

Less than 24 hours after Google (NSDQ: GOOG) announced the departure of UK, Benelux and Ireland MD Dennis Woodside to become the company’s VP for The Americas, UK ad sales director Matt Brittin has been appointed as his replacement of sorts. Brittin joined two years ago from Trinity Mirror (LSE:…

Publicly-funded broadcasters in Europe say a proposal to introduce BBC-style “public value test” across the continent would straitjacket their ability to innovate online. Options proposed under a European Commission review of how state aid applies to public service broadcasting include freeing publicly-funded networks to make more money from commercial sources,…

Oxynade, the startup which recently launched events database Happenr, has raised a €1 million first-round investment as it gets going. The site crawls other websites, RSS feeds and XML files, parses the info then makes it available in a searchable web database and iPhone app. The focus is strictly on…

A Belgian ISP has escaped paying a €750,000 (£591,000) fine after a Brussels court agreed that it could not reasonably be expected to monitor or control how its members share protected content through P2P networks. The Scarlet ISP was ordered to pay the €2,500-a-day fine (£1,970) by a lower court…

Fresh from winning a European court case forcing Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News to stop exercpting their articles, Belgian news publishers have lost their similar case against the European Commission itself - but they will press on. Their Copiepresse umbrella body had the criminal case thrown out of a Belgian court,…

Dries Buytaert, the Belgian developer behind the Drupal open-source content management system, is launching a start-up to take parts of the effort commercial. Debuted in 2001, Drupal powers newspaper sites including Bluffton Today, New York Observer, SavannahNow.com and Dagbladet Information, but it has remained a non-profit project heavily supported by…

Wall Street Journal talks with Netlog, one of Europe’s broadest and best-populated social networks by virtue of its availability in 13 different languages. Headquartered in Ghent, Belgium, the site claims 28 million members. It’s strengths - geolocalisation technology that serves up only local content across the continent and, WSJ finds…