Sky Atlantic talks move "significantly closer" to agreement

From Broadcast:

The prospect of Sky Atlantic becoming available to Virgin Media’s 3.8 million TV subscribers has moved closer after it emerged that talks between the two companies have reopened. The channel had a high-profile launch in February 2011, but the UK’s two biggest pay-TV operators never really got close to agreeing a cable carriage deal at the time. Sources have indicated that the operators have now reopened negotiations and, although a deal is not imminent, they are significantly closer to agreeing a price for Sky Atlantic than they were two years ago. One source said a “degree of realism” had entered the talks. 

It is thought that Sky could be persuaded that an additional 4 million potential viewers for Sky Atlantic would be a positive move, boosting ratings for its content, which is often accused of rating poorly relative to its quality. Carriage negotiations for Sky’s other channels on Virgin Media are due to be renewed this month, at which time a deal for Sky Atlantic is likely to be discussed.

Additional BBC HD channels

If you have trouble with your Red Button services, check out channels 991 - 994 which have additional live high def coverage of the big summer events over the next week or so. Wimbledon, Glastonbury, Moto GP and the Grand Prix are all being broadcast without the need to Press Red.

Two new HD channels launching on June 27th

According to Media Boy:
-MTV HD to launch on Virgin Channel 183 on the XL Package.
-Nick HD to launch on Virgin Channel 714 on the XL Package.

Game of Thrones s3 on Blinkbox in HD this July

The everyone's-talking-about third season of Game of Thrones will be available in HD on Blinkbox from 15 July, the streaming service has announced. Blinkbox doesn't currently offer any shows in high definition, but it's using the latest series of the epic fantasy to launch its HD service. No pricing yet for the HD though: standard definition will be available too. The price for the first two series currently costs £1.89 for each show, or £18 for a full season. That's on a buying, not rental, basis so you can watch them however many times you like. More info on www.blinkbox.com

TiVo wins almost half a billion bucks in settlements

From Variety: Google and Cisco Systems will pay TiVo an upfront sum of $490 million to settle the DVR company’s patent litigation — much less than Wall Street anticipated — and TiVo also announced that it has resolved its lawsuit against Time Warner Cable. The payments from Google and Cisco bring the total from awards and settlements related to the use of TiVo’s patents to roughly $1.6 billion, including previous deals with Dish Network, AT&T and Verizon, according to TiVo. In conjunction with approving the terms of the settlement, TiVo’s board approved a major expansion of the company’s stock repurchase program. However, investors and analysts had expected TiVo’s payout from Cisco, Google (which acquired Motorola Mobility) and TWC to be higher — with some estimates around $1 billion for Motorola alone. TiVo itself had said in court filings that it could be entitled to “billions of dollars” in royalty fees from Motorola Mobility based on the number of Motorola DVRs deployed by Time Warner Cable.

Virgin Media adds to TV Anywhere lineup

Virgin Media has added 11 more channels to Virgin TV Anywhere, its award-winning cloud-based entertainment service available exclusively to Virgin TV customers. That's in addition to the 21 added recently. Starting to look like a decent service now. The new array of live channels – including channels from ITV, A&E Networks UK and Viacom International Media Networks – enables Virgin Media subscribers to take their home entertainment beyond the TV to devices such as computers, tablets and smartphones at no extra cost. More details at http://store.virginmedia.com/discover/tv/tvanywhere/online/watch.html Still weak on the smartphones and tablets compared with Sky Go, but slowly getting there on iOS at least.