Page 10 - The Channel Issue 2 2010

THE CHANNEL | MEDIA MARKETS

FRANCE 24

grows distribution

Linx human

trafficking series

Africa results

Already available to 125m households in 160 countries, FRANCE 24 has signed a series of international broadcasting agreements to strengthen its worldwide distribution and availability on various multimedia offers across the globe.

FRANCE 24 signed deals with GlobeCast and Genesis to expand coverage of its French and English channels throughout North and Latin America using the Galaxy 23 and Intelsat 9 satellites. FRANCE 24 is now available on DISH World (channel 660) and on other select TV operators in the US. To-date over 50,000 downloads have been registered for the new application which FRANCE 24 developed exclusively for the iPad. Acclaimed by the public and the industry, the FRANCE 24 application is freely accessible on the App Store. The application allows users to pick and choose news stories through a variety of innovative functions. IPad users can watch live broadcasting from

FRANCE 24’s Arab, English and French channels - latest news, business reports, world weather forecasts and sports flashes. The FRANCE 24 iPad also gives access to a wide range of videos available on demand and to an innovative mapping tool allowing automatic and geographical referencing of news articles and videos according to location. FRANCE 24 recently launched a new HD player which provides automatic speech-to-text transcription of live dialogue. The transcript, with the corresponding images, accompanies the quasi-live broadcast on the channel’s Internet site.

According to the EMS Africa 2010 study, which measures the media consumption of 2.7m top 15% income earners in Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa, 1 in 4 Africans watches euronews. euronews viewers and euronews.net users are very loyal to the channel: 671,000 (almost 25% of the top 15% income earners) watch the channel or visit the website every week.

On the editorial side, Mohamed Elhamy has been appointed euronews' permanent correspondent, after holding the Cairo-based post since June 2010.

In July, Moïna Fauchier Delavigne joined euronews as Deputy Editor in Chief of New Media. Fluent in French, English, Arabic and Spanish, Moïna is responsible for monitoring the editorial line and for the launch of a new website.

Human trafficking is one of the fastest growing forms of organised crime in the world. Most people ignore the issue or are simply unaware but through a five-part series for BBC World TV, Faridoun Hemani of Linx Productions and Anne Reevell of Moonbeam Films hope to change that.

The series looks at human trafficking worldwide, in all its forms, with the emphasis on what big business can do to help end this modern form of slavery. The series reports on border trafficking at the Mexico-USA

border; sexual exploitation of children in Kenya’s tourist resorts; the underpaid workers in the garment industry in India; child labour in tobacco farms in Malawi and India; and child brides in Egypt – for this the producers managed to get an

IN BRIEF

ABU GA TOKYO

NHK President Shigeo Fukuchi is hosting the 47th ABU General Assembly from 14-20 October in Tokyo. The theme is ‘Resilience of Broadcasting’. Fukuchi said he hoped the event will be a forum in which broadcasters can rediscover the mission of broadcasting – to provide reliable information and enrich culture and the day-to-day lives of viewers and listeners. As part of the event, NHK has organised an excursion to the Nikko World Heritage site.

DW-PUNKT

DW-TV presented a special series to mark the bicentennial of Latin America's independence from Spain – the multilingual, multimedia project “From Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana”. It coincided with the opening of the first DW-Punkt, Deutsche Welle's multimedia Internet terminal in Spanish-speaking Latin America. DW journalists travelled from the Southern tip of Chile to the Mexican-American border, reporting on history, politics, economics and people's daily lives, and users were able to take part via Internet, radio and TV.

TV AZTECA RECORD

TV Azteca, one of the two largest producers of Spanish-language TV programming in the world, posted a record $228.9m in sales for Q2, driven by advertising demand from the World Cup and other soccer-related

programming. CEO Mario San Roman attributed the solid performance to attractive programming grids, complemented by campaigns for the World Cup Soccer coverage. Quarterly net income came in at $29m, a 24% gain compared to the previous period.

10 | ISSUE 2 2010 | THE CHANNEL

exclusive interview with Egypt’s First Lady Suzanne Mubarak. The series was sponsored by Telecom Egypt and End Human Trafficking Now (EHTN). Both Hemani and Reevell hope to get more funding to produce another series on the subject.