BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) should lower its subscription prices and offer its premium sports and movie content to rivals on a wholesale basis to ensure technological innovation on other platforms, according to media regulator Ofcom. As part of a new public consultation kicked off today on possible remedies for the pay…

It took on BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) as a plucky challenger in the battlefield of live sports, but at 6 pm on Tuesday Setanta’s channels went off air as the company’s UK division fell into administration following a failed £20 million rescue attempt last week. Adminstrator Deloitte said yesterday it’s working…

US sportscaster ESPN (NYSE: DIS) has achieved its long-standing ambition of establishing a major foothold in the UK and Europe by winning the rights to broadcast 46 live English Premier League rights next season and 23 games for three seasons starting in 2010/11. That’s all the rights in collapsing Setanta’s…

—Warner Bros-Blinkbox: London-based VOD site Blinkbox has signed a deal to add Warner Bros movies to its streaming service on a paid-for basis. Already a Blinkbox partner, Warner now adds more than 1,100 films and TV shows both new and old, with prices for movies around the £2.19 mark. The…

Pay TV in the UK is notable for its disappointing lack of digital strategy. BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) may be pushing its content through the XBox and a standalone online portal—but essentially, despite all the lip service and stated commitment to new, online business models, just like newspapers the industry still…

When your business model is under threat, you have no choice but to change it. According to several reports, sports broadcaster Setanta is considering a radical switch in strategy from a customer-facing TV subscriptions to wholesale content distribution. FT.com reports that the company, which owns English Premier League TV rights…

—BSkyB—Virgin Media: BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) could be looking to bolster its digital TV portfolio by splashing out on seven channels from its close pay TV rival Virgin Media: according to FT.com, Sky is offering a so-far unbeaten £160 million for VMED’s VMtv content division, including Living and Bravo. VMED has…

BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) announced they will deliver the former’s live TV and VOD through the Xbox games console (see our post for full details). The result, which lets football fans join a text-and-audio “party” during live games, is perhaps the most innovative on-the-market social TV experiences…

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is giving Sky a leg-up in the VOD and IPTV stakes. The pair have teamed to bring both on-demand shows and more than 20 live Sky channels to Xbox Live in Q3. This deal gives Xbox its first UK TV content but is also the first time…

Yes, Sky News is just the latest news org to jump on the app bandwagon. Its new iPhone tool packs the usual mix of news section feeds, includes three headline video wrap-ups (only for top heads, showbiz and weather, but not for individual stories), and, weirdly, a page inviting SMS…

—BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) music: Long after plans of the scheme first surfaced, more detail on BSkyB’s music download subscription service, run in partnership with Universal. The service, called Sky Songs, will reportedly charge from £4.99 per month for five tracks to £11.99 for 20 tracks and two complete albums, according…

—BBC Worldwide: Global ad sales EVP Chris Dobson has poached two former Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) coworkers in a restructure designed to sell ads “across the ‘three screens’ of television,  web and mobile for the first time”. Microsoft’s international sales marketing director Anne Goodman becomes VP of enablement and trade marketing,…

—ITN Source: ITN’s multimedia division is adding music to its thousands of hours of TV footage through a deal with EMI Music-owned digital music distributor KPM Music. Anyone that buys a clip from ITN Source using its online store (pictured) will be given the option of also downloading one of…

We warned BBC director-general Mark Thompson back in March that his Project Canvas was likely to face Kangaroo-style competition scrutiny. Now Sky has ripped the proposal to shreds in a 14-page BBC Trust submission designed to open a competition inquiry. Sky says… —It’s anti-competitive: Canvas “has the propensity to affect…

—BBC-Celebdaq: The BBC is resurrecting its online celebrity news-based stock exchange game Celebdaq. Though the game is still played by around 25,000 people a week, its popularity waned since the buzz surrounding it briefly prompted a spin-off BBC3 TV show in 2003. The re-launched game, developed by Monterosa, will incorporate…

—FindAnyFilm.com: The UK Film Council’s new website claims to have hit 10 two million visits in the 10 weeks since its launch. FindAnyFilm.com, dubbled a “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for film”, launched in January after a £1 million build-out to offer cinema and TV listings, DVD, Blu-ray and download options for…

It’s taken a while, but broadcasters, online publishers and advertisers could be close to agreeing a standardised system to measure online video viewing. The Broadband Measurement Working Group, a coalition of broadcasters, ISPs and measurement bodies, is to start testing a new measurement metric next month, 18 months after starting…

—Discovery Networks: Kathy Toher is the new director of international advertising across EMEA, excluding the UK, for Discovery Networks Europe. She moves over from classical music download site Passionato, where she was head of advertising sales and promotion since its launch last year. Last month former MD of UK channels…

Jeremy Darroch’s BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) posted a 23 percent-better operating profit of £622 million over the first three months of this year, despite signing 100,000 fewer broadband customers than in the year before. Broadband sign-ups slowed from 229,000 to 130,000 (total now 2.08 million)—Sky’s only business segment in which growth…