From WOOD@stab.sr.seTue Dec 5 17:33:44 1995
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 15:07:41 +0100
From: George Wood <WOOD@stab.sr.se>
To: wood@rs.sr.se
Subject: MediaScan/Sweden Calling DXers
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:: MediaScan ::
:: SWEDEN CALLING DXERS ::
:: from Radio Sweden ::
:: Number 2237--Dec. 5, 1995 ::
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
************************