From WOOD@stab.sr.seTue Dec 5 17:33:44 1995 Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 15:07:41 +0100 From: George Wood To: wood@rs.sr.se Subject: MediaScan/Sweden Calling DXers ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :: MediaScan :: :: SWEDEN CALLING DXERS :: :: from Radio Sweden :: :: Number 2237--Dec. 5, 1995 :: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Satellite, shortwave and other electronic media news from Radio Sweden. This week's bulletin was written by George Wood. Packet Radio BID SCDX2237 All times UTC unless otherwise noted. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NORDIC MEDIA NEWS: RADIO SWEDEN--Don't miss Radio Sweden's coverage of the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo in our programs on Sunday December 10th. SWEDISH PRIVATE RADIO--Controversy continues over the future of private commercial radio in this country. When the new Social Democratic government took over here in September 1994, Minister of Culture Margot Wallstroem moved to block the previous government's system of auctioning off channels to the highest bidder. But the parties that set up that system, the Conservatives and Liberals, used a constitutional loophole to keep their system in place for one more year. The final auction under the old system was held here at the end of November, for 13 frequencies in provincial cities and towns. There were no bidders for two of the licences in smaller communities. The major networks seem to have swallowed up most of the licences. Since networking isn't really allowed, the bids came from private persons who were acting on behalf of the major networks. Parliament is scheduled to to forbid future auctions tomorrow, and a parliamentary committee is trying to develop a system other than the most money for allocating licences, to encourage a greater variation on the air. With the latest auction there are now 92 private radio stations licenced in Sweden, and most just play music and commercials. ("Dagens Nyheter" and "Svenska Dagbladet") At the same time that the auction was being held, the public service Swedish Broadcasting Corporation was presenting a study covering radio broadcasts in three Swedish cities during a week's period. The conclusions of the report are that after two years of operation, Swedish commercial radio doesn't meet any of the main intentions of the law, and that the private stations fail to represent their local areas, and don't contribute to increased freedom of speech. The report has been presented to the parliamentary committee preparing the guidelines for the future of public service broadcasting in this country. ("Dagens Nyheter") FUTURE TELEVISION--There are other studies into the future of television in Sweden, specifically the planned fourth terrestrial television channel. Channels 1 and 2 are run by the non-commercial public broadcaster Swedish Television. The third channel is the commercial TV4. One study carried out for the Minister of Culture recommends that a fourth analog TV channel not be established. Instead, the report recommends that waiting for digital systems, which will offer far more capacity. Another report, prepared for the Minister of Education, on the future of educational television in this country, has reached similar conclusions. The study was carried out by Peter Erichs, who joined me today in the MediaScan studio. He has recommended against creating a fourth anaolog terrestrial network for educational programming. Instead, he proposes that the existing three surface broadcasters carry more educational programming, including during prime time. The next terrestrial network should be digital, and put at the disposal of the existing three TV broadcasters. DIGITAL TV--Scandinavia's first digital TV channel, FilmNet Nethold's new satellite-based SuperSport, didn't have any Swedish viewers for its first broadcast. A few smaller cable networks in Denmark and Norway are carrying the new channel, not none in Sweden, as they'd have to remove some other station to make room for SuperSport. The Astra 1E satellite was inoperative, so the channel was moved over to Intelsat 702. But those who could watch that satellite couldn't watch SuperSport, as there won't be any decoders on the market until next month. FilmNet calls the decoders "Multimedia terminals". They will cost at least USD 1000 each, but will include reception of Astra Digital Radio and DMX. (Frank Oestergren, "Aftonbladet") THOR--The satellite war between Sweden and Norway is entering a new phase. In July we reported that the Swedish Space Corporation and GE were building a second Sirius satellite to be placed at the Swedish satellite position at 5 degrees East. Now Hughes Space and Communications International has announced it is providing a new satellite for the Norwegian position at 1 degree West, currently the home of Intelsat 702, TV-Sat-2, and Thor. The new satellite will be called Thor II-A, and will carry 15 40 watt transponders in the Ku-band. Like Sirius 2, Thor 2 will be launched in 1997. (Curt Swinehart) KINNEVIK--Sweden's answer to Rupert Murdoch, Jan Stenbeck's Kinnevik, has fired Bertil Sundberg, the "Space Doctor", who wrote an excellent weekly column of satellite news in Stenbeck's satellite TV guide, "Paa TV". Bertil Sundberg has speculated that the magazine may be in a financial crisis. He's maintaining his World Wide Web site, which is at: http://www.algonet.se/~rymdis/EW.htm Kinnevik is moving its TV3 and TV1000 channels from Astra to 1 degree West to create a Sky-like package, apparently including the Sci-Fi Channel, the History Channel, VH-1 Sweden, and two new pay-per-view film channels. (Frank Oestergren) EUROPEAN MEDIA NEWS: MURDOCH--The Ango-Saxon world's answer to Jan Stenbeck, Rupert Murdoch, is in the midst of things again. Shares in his British Sky Broadcasting plunged nearly 10 percent Friday, on news of an official review of its position in the British pay-TB market. The Office of Fair Trading will be studying BSkyB's supply of programming to cable operators. (AP, Reuters) Murdoch is establishing alliances around the world with American cable giant TCI. TCI's British subsidiary Flextech says it is selling a stake in its Starstream childrens TV channel (presumeably this is the Children's Channel) to Murdoch's Fox Television, which would give Fox instant access to Scandinavia, the Benelux, and Britain. (Curt Swinehart) TCI--TCI has formed a new cable and satellite television programming company will France's Canal Plus and Generale d'Images. The joint venture, to be based in Paris, will be known as Multithematiques SA, and will create new channels and products for Europe, and will provide new services to Latin American and Japanese cable subscribers. (Reuters) FRANCE--Following the successful launch of the ISO scientific satellite on November 16, the next Ariane launch is scheduled for December 7. It will be carrying Telecom 2C for France and India's Insat 2C. ("Tele- satellit") EUTELSAT--Eutelsat has signed a contract with Arianespace for the launch of three new television and telecommunciations satellites. The TV satellite Hot Bird 4 will be placed alongside Eutelsat II-F1 and Hot Bird 1 and the upcoming 2 and 3 at 13 degrees East. The other two satellites, for telecommunications, are known as W24, and will replace two existing Eutelsat II satellites at other orbital positions. They will be launched from French Guiana, beginning in mid-1997. (Eutelsat, Curt Swinehart) ROMANIA--TV Romania International began broadcasts on December 1. Initially programs are for 3 and a half hours a day via Eutelsat II-F3, between 19:30 and 23:00 hrs UTC. By 1998, the channel hopes to broadcast to the United States. (AP, Reuters) CENTRAL EUROPE--Home Box Office and FilmNet Nethold are negotiating to bring in major investors from Hollywood studios, for new channels to Central Europe. MCA and Sony Pictures are among the companies pursuing the deals most aggressively. HBO hopes to have about 1.3 million Central European cable subscribers by 2004, and FilmNet expects to have a total of 1.2 million cable and direct-to-home subscribers by then. Internal documents from Sony show the studio considering taking a 20 percent share of FilmNet's Central European operations, or buying roughly one-third of HBO's operations in Central Europe. (Multichannel News) AFRICAN MEDIA NEWS: SOUTH AFRICA--Digital Music Express was scheduled to launch a service to South Africa on December 1 called DMX(R). Multichoice, the company that recently introduced the DStv MPEG-2 digital direct-to-home TV service to South Africa, will offer subscribers 40 channels of DMX as part of its basic package. DStv and DMX are reaching South Africa subscribers via the PAS-4 satellite. Multichoice, owned by Nethold, has also reached aggreements to distribute CNN International, ESPN Africa, VH-1, TNT/Cartoon Network, and the Discovery Channel to South Africa. (PR Newswire) NORTH AMERICAN MEDIA NEWS: TTRN--The Tech Talk Radio Network was scheduled to vacate the failing Telstar 402 satellite at the end of November. The new home was expected to be Galaxy 6. On the positive side the new channel was to have audio on the subcarrier 24 hours a day. On the negative side, being a scrambled channel, people with VC decoders will have to mess around a bit to hear TTRN, and taping on VCRs will be difficult, requiring supplying a video sync source to the VCR. (Gary Bourgois via Curt Swinehart) MORE MURDOCH--Rupert Murdoch is also taking on Ted Turner and the Cable News Network. In a speech in Boston, Murdoch accused Turner of moving to the left, and announced plans to launch a rival 24 hours news channel in the United States. But as to the date, he would only say that it would be within the next few years. (A couple of years ago Murdoch announced plans for a global version of his Sky News service, plans which were later shelved, when the project proved too expensive.) In reply, Ted Turner said he was "looking forward to squishing Rupert like a bug". (AP and Reuters) ABC--A week after Murdoch's announcement, the "New York Times" reported that the ABC Network is launching a 24 hour all-news channel via cable and satellite. (AP and NPR) CNN--CNN will be launching its CNN Financial Network in the United states on December 29. ("Tele-satellit") LATIN AMERICAN MEDIA NEWS: CNN--The Cable News Network says it will launch an all-news channel entirely in Spanish for Latin America on March 1, 1997. (Reuters) TCI--Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the largest cable operator in North America, TCI, have announced an agreement to develop and operate a direct-to-home satellite service for all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Bringing in Brazil's Globo and Mexico's Televisa, the service would launch in May 1996. The parties also announced that PanAmSat, Intelsat, and Murdoch's decoder subdivision News Datacom would be major service providers to the partnership. PaAmSat will contribute 48 transponders on its PAS-3, PAS-5 and PAS-6 satellites (scheduled for launch in December 1995, early 1997, and late 1996 respectively), which will enable the DTH partnership to transmit hundreds of digital channels. One source says the alliance will involve three platforms -- for Mexico, Brazil, and the rest of Latin America -- with Televisa. Globo, and News Corp heading distribution in the respective areas. The venture will evenutally provide 150 channels of Spanish and Portuguese language programming. The new service will be a major threat to Hughes' planned Galaxy Latin America 144 channel DTH service, due to launch in March, 1996. TCI and News Corp have also agreed to join together to manage sport networks, such as Star Sports in Asia and Prime Deportiva in Latin America. In doing so they are taking on the American sports giant ESPN, owned by Capital Cities/ABC, that is, Disney. (Curt Swinehart, "Tele- satellit", and Reuters) COLOMBIA--Colombia has asked other Andean nations to join in funding an Andean telecommunciations satellite system. Government representatives and businessmen from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia were asked to approve the project at a two day meeting in late November in the Caribbean port city of Cartegena. (Reuters) ASIAN MEDIA NEWS: PANAMSAT--ESPN is broadcasting on the new PAS-4 satellite on 3865 MHz, sound 7.20 MHz. (Bertil Sundberg) Bloomberg Information Television is now broadcasting to the Pacific via PAS-2. Other broadcasters on that satellite now include ABS-CBN, Asia Business News, China Central Television, Disney, Discovery, ESPN, Liberty, NBC, NHK, Television Corporation of Singapore, Turner Broadcasting, TVBI, and Viacom. ((Business Wire) CHINA--The Gals 2 satellite was successfully launched from Kazakhstan on November 17th. Russian built and Chinese-owned, Gals 2 will be leased for USD 9 million a year to the Global DBS Company, which includes the Loral Corp., General Instruments, and TCI from the United States, and Britain's General Telecommunciations Ltd/Asian TV Network. Gals carries 3 high-powered transponders. Gals 1 is located at 71 degrees East. Gals 2 could be located at any of the 17 slots reserved for Gals at the ITU. (Cur Swinehart and Jean-Philippe Donnio, via Kauto Huopio) ASIASAT--Rupert Murdoch is celebrating after the successful launch of the Asiasat-2 satellite on November 30th. It carries 24 C-band transponders and 9 Ku-band band transponders, and will be Asia's first digital broadcast satellite. The launch was delayed nine months, following China's failure to launch the Apstar-2 satellite last January. Murdoch's Star-TV will launch a series of digital channels to Asia from the new satellite. According to Murdoch himself, this includes movie channels in Mandarin, Hindi, English, Indonesian, Tagalog, Cantonese and Japanese. Besides movies, Murdoch wants Star to dominate the markets for sports, general entertainment, music and youth programming. Other broadcasters booked on Asiasat-2 include the Associated Press's APTV, Reuters Financial Television, Worldwide Television News, Hong Kong Telecom, Portugal's Marconi Global Communications, Malaysia's Time Telecommunications, and Germany's Deutsche Welle. Included in the Deutsche Welle package is the World Radio Network, and in today's program I asked WRN's Jeff Cohen what they will be doing on Asiasat-2. He also talked about WRN's new Streamworks transmissions over the Internet. CYBERSPACE: ABC--ABC's World News Now is the first regularly scheduled newscast on the Internet. Between 2:00 and 4:00 AM EST, the overnight TV news program is available around the world in the CU-SeeMe format. The CUSeeMe reflector in Europe is 158.36.33.3 The US reflector is: gsh.org (Usenet news via Curt Swinehart) WORLD RADIO NETWORK--WRN has dropped its Streamworks bit rate down to 11 kbps, which makes it accessible to computer users with 14.4 kbps modems. WRN's Jeff Cohen talks about the Streamworks service in today's program. More information about Streamworks at: http://www.xingtech.com/streams/ If you have Streamworks installed, WRN's server is at Internet Multicasting at: town.hall.org RADIO SWEDEN--We get a lot of letters from people asking about the "DXers Guide to the Galaxy", our booklet about monitoring satellites that just got to be too much work to keep up-to-date. For those who are interested, the final January 1994 edition of the guide is now available on our World Wide Web pages. While much of the material is very dated now, some of the basics about monitoring broadcasts satellites, the space shuttle, amateur radio satellites, or weather facsimile may be of interest. We hope to update eventually the "For More Information Section". If there's enough interest other chapters might also be updated. The "DXers Guide to the Galaxy starts at: http://www.sr.se/rs/english/media/galaxy.htm You also find our new Moose Gallery on our Web site, and vote in our Moose Mascot Survey. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sweden Calling DXers/MediaScan is the world's oldest radio program about international broadcasting. Radio Sweden has presented this round-up of radio news, features, and interviews on Tuesdays since 1948. It's currently broadcast on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. Radio Sweden broadcasts in English: To Europe: 17:15 hrs 1179 and 6065 kHz 18:30 1179, 6065, 7240, and 9655 kHz (also Africa/Middle East) 21:30 1179, 6065, and 7230 kHz (also Africa/Middle East) 22:30 1179 and 6065 kHz (also Africa/Middle East) 23:30 1179 kHz Asia/Pacific: 12:30 hrs 9835, 13740, and 15240 kHz 01:30 hrs 7120 kHz North America: 13:30 hrs on 11650 and 15240 kHz 14:30 hrs on 11650 and 15245 kHz 02:30 and 03:30 hrs on 7120 kHz Latin America: 00:30 hrs on 6065 and 9850 kHz The broadcasts at 17:15 and 18:30 hrs are also relayed to Europe by satellite: Astra 1C on ZDF's transponder 33 at 10.964 GHz, audio subcarrier at 7.38 MHz Tele-X via TV5 Nordic/Femman's transponder at 12.475 GHz, audio subcarrier 7.38 MHz Radio Sweden is also relayed to Europe via the World Radio Network on VH-1's transponder 22 on Astra 1C, audio 7.38 MHz, daily at 22:00 hrs CET. Radio Sweden can also be heard on WRN's North American service on Galaxy-5, on WTBS's transponder 6, audio 6.8 MHz, daily at 21:30 and 00:00 hrs Eastern time. Our new World Wide Web page is at: http://www.sr.se/rs A multimedia version of this bulletin can be found at: http://www.sr.se/rs/english/scdx.htm Sound recordings of interviews from previous programs can be found at: http://www.sr.se/rs/english/media2.htm Sound files of Mediascan are archived at: ftp.funet.fi:pub/sounds/RadioSweden/Mediascan. You can also find the programs among the offerings of Internet Talk Radio at various sites, including: ftp://town.hall.org/radio/Mirrors/RadioSweden/MediaScan Radio Sweden news (recorded at 01:30 hrs UTC daily) as well recordings of MediaScan are available in the Real Audio format via the World Radio Network, at: http://www.wrn.org WRN programming is carried live over the Internet in the Streamworks format. The WRN server is at Internet Multicasting at: town.hall.org Contributions can be sent to DX Editor George Wood by fax to +468-667-6283 or by e-mail to: wood@rs.sr.se Reports can also be sent to: Radio Sweden S-105 10 Stockholm Sweden Contributions should be NEWS about electronic media--from shortwave to satellites--and not loggings of information already available from sources such as the "World Radio TV Handbook". Clubs and DX publications may reprint material as long as MediaScan/Sweden Calling DXers and the original contributor are acknowledged. We welcome comments and suggestions about the electronic edition, Sweden Calling DXers, and our programs in general. The mailing list for the Electronic Edition is now open to general subscription. If you can send e-mail over the Internet, send a message to: subscribe@rs.sr.se You ought to get a confirmation message in reply. To unsubscribe from the list, send a message to unsubscribe@rs.sr.se To get a copy of Radio Sweden's English program schedule, write to: english@rs.sr.se And for general questions, comments, and reception reports, our e-mail address is: info@rs.sr.se ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to this week's contributors Good Listening!  ************************ George Wood wood@rs.sr.se Radio Sweden http://www.sr.se/rs S-105 10 Stockholm tel: +468-784-7239 Sweden fax: +468-667-6283 ************************