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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: let who wrote (28937)	1/29/1998 4:00:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

Spain......................................... ijumpstart.com Spain <Picture><Picture><Picture> The craziness that is the Spanish television industry can be seen in last month's surprise move when the main rivals to the Canal Plus-backed Spanish digital platform Canal Satelite obtained carriage for a channel partly owned by the French pay-TV operator. Pan European network Eurosport signed on with the Spanish government-owned Via Digital pay-TV platform for 18 hours per day (though only 10 hours in Spanish). Currently, the network - jointly owned by ESPN, TF1 and Canal Plus - can only be seen in Spain via satellite. As in most other European television markets, the Spanish one has been punctuated with competing players. In fact, the expected Spanish digital war turned out to be more of a 'conflict' as Canal Satelite has grabbed the lion's share of the programme rights, including Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, Columbia TriStar, DreamWorks and PolyGram. It appears that Via Digital is giving up on movies in order to concentrate more fully on sports rights, which its executives see as more of a driver of digital uptake. For the time being, Via Digital has the upper hand, as a Spanish court ruled that it could exclusively broadcast football games for the 1997-98 season. However, a question mark hangs over the ensuing seasons. Via Digital says it signed an exclusive six-year, Pounds 525 million deal with Audiovisual Sport for the football rights. On the other hand, Sogecable maintains that it already had paid Pounds 61 million for the five seasons starting with the 1998-99 season. In August, Spanish PTT Telefonica (which controls Via Digital) rejected an olive branch from its rival that would have led to its sharing the rights. Meanwhile, Spanish cinema attendance paced Europe. European cinemas hit a 10-year high water mark last year with 742 million in attendance (a 5.8 per cent increase), with Spain leading the way with a 13.2 per cent jump, according to the Strasbourg-based European Audiovisual Observatory.