Pan-European newspaper publisher Mecom is selling its Norwegian business Edda Media to rival A-Pressen for €221.8 ($299.67/£190.79) million.

According to figures from IE Market Research, there are currently 832 million paid users of digital music worldwide, with that number expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2014. Today, announcements from streamed entertainment provider Aspiro and the music download service 7digital point—respectively announcing a new white-label distribution deal and…

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…

There’s no question that apps have become a global phenomenon in the mobile world—and who doesn’t want to catapult a cute red bird onto some logs to kill a pig? But not all apps are as wildly successful as Angry Birds. So just as importantly, when it comes to what…

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,…

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.

Update: Clear Channel announced that it is the media company buying the cloud-based music subscription service Thumbplay Music—a deal that was first reported by mocoNews.net. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but our source says it is likely to be less than 10 percent of the company’s…

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) may be rethinking how it delivers mobile music—shuttering its Ovi Unlimited music service—but it is not giving up on digital entertainment altogether. The Swedish VOD and streaming site Voddler has announced that it has picked up an additional $8 million in funding, with this round led by…

Aspiro, the hosted and white-label mobile TV and music provider, today announced that it has sold its remaining mobile entertainment business in Finland to Exsol Oy, for €100,000 ($137,000; £86,000), a holding company set up by games/ringtone distributor Buumi International. This follows a sale of entertainment assets in Norway, Sweden…

One school of thought, in the challenged news business, holds that publishers should augment their conventional income from ads and circulation sales with new revenue streams. But offering loans has to be one of the most original we’ve seen.

Here is the current dilemma, for many a consumer online news publisher, summed up in a graph pair… In slides presented to investors today, Schibsted‘s Norwegian publisher Media Norge says: “Overall traffic levels may be reaching saturation and online ad prices are stagnating...”

—TalkTalk: The UK ISP has announced it is upgrading its broadband customers to the fastest sync speeds that their lines will support, up to 24Mbps, as a network-wide upgrade of its backhaul network that has seen Gigabit Ethernet fiber installed between all its exchanges. It is also removing peer-to-peer traffic…

—France IPTV: Orange France is upping its game in competition with pay-TV providers CanalSat and TV Numeric. It is in discussions to carry five new pay-TV channels on its IPTV and satellite services, currently only available on the other platforms: LCI, Eurosport, Paris Premiere, Planete and TF6. (Via Le Figaro.)…

—Free Films Direct: A new movie service for Sweden, the land of Spotify and Pirate Bay. Free Films Direct comes from Sweden’s Brixgate Communications and has Paramount Digital Entertainment repertoire, offering paid downloads and streaming plus ad-supported free films. Via Hollywood Reporter and release. —MuZu.tv/O2: The Irish music video site…

British newspapers can’t catch a break when it comes to growing online earnings - just look at Trinity Mirror’s negative digital growth in 2009 so far. But Scandinavian publishers aren’t finding things quite as tough… For the three months to September 30, Norway’s based Schibsted reported a 52 percent lift…

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…

Former MEN Media head of online editorial Sarah Hartley, who left last week after eight years, is joining GMG stablemate Guardian News & Media to work on “online developmental projects”. How-Do is repeating its earlier speculation GNM is planning a Manchester local website - a GNM spokesperson told us: “We…

—Gavin & Stacey: What’s occurring? This: Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is giving away season two of the BBC sitcom on board its Nokia 5800 handsets from Monday. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has previously marketed its N96 along with BBC’s iPlayer, but a bundled video deal is rather unique. The DVD is currently…

Another study has concluded what we sort of suspected about people who really like to get new music. Those who download illegally via P2P also buy more music - in fact, they are 10 times as likely to buy tunes as those who stay legal, according to BI Norwegian School…