France launches world TV channel
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France's first international news channel is launched into competition with BBC World and CNN.
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The French public broadcasting regulator authorized an Arabic-language television station close to the Lebanese Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group to transmit programs within the European Union.
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(InfoWorld) - Paris-based video sharing site Dailymotion SA has landed a fresh round of funding to help it compete with U.S. rival YouTube, which has been gaining strength in Europe since it launched local versions of its service in June. Like YouTube, Dailymotion invites visitors to pick from a huge variety of streaming videos, or to upload their own videos to its site. On Friday, the company landed an additional US$34 million in venture capital funding to continue its development, a spokeswoman said. The investors are Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity. AGFPE's investments include French online dating service Meetic.com and professional networking site Viadeo.com, a rival to LinkedIn. Dailymotion took an early lead in tailoring content for different nationalities, offering sites for 14 countries including China, Germany, Japan, Russia and Turkey, but in June YouTube, owned by Google Inc., struck back with its own French-language service, as well as localized sites for other countries. YouTube's internationalization has hit Dailymotion, according to European audience figures from market researcher Comscore. Starting at 54.7 million unique visitors in February, the European audience for YouTube's properties rose steadily to 72.2 million in July. Dailymotion's visitor numbers also rose initially, from 11.8 million in February to 16.3 million in May, but then they stalled, declining to 14.7 million in July. German site MyVideo.de also grew, but more slowly, from 9.1 million visitors in February to 10.3 million in June, the same number it attracted in July. DailyMotion still reaches more viewers in its native France than does YouTube, according to Comscore's figures, but its lead is narrowing. Both companies attracted more viewers overall, to the detriment of smaller players in the market. The German market, too, is becoming a two-horse race, with YouTube drawing further ahead of MyVideo Broadband SRL. Third-placed Clipfish GmbH & Co. KG now has less than half the audience of MyVideo, according to Comscore, which counts unique visitors aged 15 and over, excluding traffic from public computers and mobile phones. To attract more visitors, Dailymotion is looking to strike further deals with rights owners like Warner Music, which agreed to allow Dailymotion to host music videos in return for a cut of the revenue. As part of that strategy, it will begin using a digital fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic Corp. to identify the owners of copyright material. As a video is uploaded, Audible Magic's software calculates a signature unique to that file and compares it to the signatures in a central database of works claimed by the copyright holder. If the signatures match, the software signals the upload as a copyright violation. Â
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There are mixed reactions to a draft UN resolution on Lebanon, a German paper raises concerns over the future of free-to-air television, and a French daily welcomes tourists from emerging countries.
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France is pressing on with plans for a French-language rival to 24-hour global news stations such as CNN, a minister says, adding that such a station would help France explain its foreign policy.
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The 24-hour news service aims to plunge viewers into regions and perspectives that get little air time elsewhere.
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Excerpt from report by Kyrgyz Television 1 on 12 February  [Presenter] Another TV broadcaster, called 5 Channel, started to broadcast from today. It will be broadcasting in two languages - Kyrgyz and Russian, and nine news bulletins will be broadcast throughout the day.
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Ex-US Vice President Al Gore launches a UK TV channel that will feature programmes made by viewers.
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If you live in France, are a Muslim sympathizer, speak Arabic and have access to satellite television, you are probably a fan of al Manar broadcasts.
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France has called for an EU-wide debate after a Lebanese television station accused of spreading anti-Semitic propaganda for the Muslim militant group Hezbollah was pulled from a French satellite television network following a French ruling banning it.
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Text of report by Kyrgyz news agency 24.kg website  Bishkek, 5 February: A new TV broadcaster, called The Fifth Channel, will be launched in Kyrgyzstan next Monday, 12 February.  The Fifth Channel will go on air next Monday, 12 February, the TV company's press service has said.
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ launched versions of its video sharing service YouTube in French and other languages on Tuesday. Localized versions now exist for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. TheÂ French siteÂ features titles and help pages in French, and the top video is a welcome message from French rapper Kamini, who began promoting his brand of rural rap through YouTube's English-language site last November with a video clip entitled "Marly-Gomont". For now, the international sites draw on the same database of videos and rankings as the U.S. site, but in time Google plans to add country-specific video rankings and comments, it said Tuesday. Today, the French site displays French-language content and rankings previously posted to the main site. "The big thing for YouTube in 2007 is access," YouTube founder Chad Hurley said at a Google news conference in Paris on Tuesday. Hurley and his co-foundersÂ sold YouTube to GoogleÂ last October for $1.65 billion. "We have a goal to put YouTube on every screen, and we mean on mobile devices and in the living room. Right now it's restricted to your browser, to your PC, and we want you to be able to take that same content and bring it to your mobile phone and be able to watch it in your living room," Hurley said. Plans to reach those other screens are already under way: on May 30, Apple announced it will put YouTube in the living room by building support for it into a future software update for itsÂ AppleTV set-top box, while on Saturday YouTube launched a version of its site for mobile phones. However, it will require partnerships with mobile phone operators, and months or even years of work, before YouTube Mobile offers the same experience as the Web site offers PC users today, Hurley said. Over half of YouTube's traffic today comes from outside the U.S., Hurley said, and delivering localized versions of YouTube is a way for the company to capitalize on that. However, expanding internationally may expose YouTube to the kinds of censorship issues that Google has been experiencing in China. "I think a platform such as YouTube has to respect local laws and customs," YouTube founder Chad Hurley, adding that the company is developing ways to enable the fine-grained control of content required to do that. In preparation for the launch of the new sites, YouTube has already signed content partnerships with the British Broadcasting Corp.; French 24-hour news channel France 24; Spain's Antena 3 and Cuatro TV; RÃ¡dio e TelevisÃ£o de Portugal; the Dutch VPRO and NPO; European football clubs such as Chelsea FC, AC Milan, Barcelona FC, and Real Madrid, and nonprofit organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and MÃ©dÃ©cins du Monde, said Google. In the past, Google's cultural initiatives such asÂ Google Book SearchÂ have faced criticism -- from the head of the French National Library, Jean-NoÃ«l Jeanneney, among others -- for the way in which they encourage the dominance of U.S. values by making it easier to find cultural resources in English than in other languages. Linking with producers of local cultural content and making it easier to search that material may improve Google's image in some countries. That said, YouTube has proved popular in Europe despite only having an English-language interface until now. In France in April, its U.S. site had almost as many visitors as the French-language pages of local video sharing service DailyMotion, according to market researcher comScore,Â (DailyMotion also offers services in a number of other languages, including English, German, Russian, and Japanese.) One European language notably missing from the new crop of YouTube sites is German. YouTube is already the No. 1 video sharing site in Germany, according to Comscore, narrowly ahead of the German-language service MyVideo operated by MyVideo Broadband SRL of Bucharest, Romania. In Germany, it's more important to understand the German viewer's mind-set than their language, according to Anca-Alina Seghedi, CEO of MyVideo. "Most of the German users of video communities already speak English, at least sufficiently to navigate on an international web site. That means the language barrier is not the main decisive point for users to choose their favorite web sites," she said Friday. MyVideo may be better placed to understand Germans than YouTube, said Seghedi. "It is questionable whether they will be able to adapt to the German consumer tastes, which has been quite an important aspect of MyVideo's success in Germany." At Google's news conference on Tuesday, YouTube international manager Sakina Arsiwala said: "We have to talk to more people on the ground. We were not ready for Germany yet, from the product side or partnership side. We would love to be in Germany." (James Niccolai in Paris contributed to this report.) Â
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Winning the rights to broadcast premiere  league football matches will help France Telecom step up its  transformation into an integrated multi-media group, analysts  said on Thursday.
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France's first gay TV station, which from next month will offer its viewers a heavy diet of English-language comedy and homosexual porn, has lassoed in a pop culture icon as its media mascot: Wonder Woman.
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Friday signalled an even closer relationship with the country&#39;s neighbours over the Channel by launching a version of his own website in French.
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Excerpt from report by Russian news agency Ekho Moskvy  Moscow, 7 September: The transmission of four 24-hour digital TV channels carrying programmes produced by Channel One has started in Russia.
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Gays across France are celebrating the launch of the country's first television channel for homosexuals, anticipating a pink mixture of fashion, travel, talk, cult movies, music and soap operas.