The merger of Bulgaria's top cable providers, Eurocom and CableTel, has resulted in a new brand name: Blizoo. The new entity "has the ambition to turn into Bulgaria's leading digital television operator and the biggest broadband Internet provider," said Istvan Polony, chief executive of Blizoo.
Elsewhere overseas, the new coalition government in the United Kingdom said it will appoint a new "minister of broadband" by the end of this week. The new minister will immediately face the task of ensuring that everyone in the country gets a minimum broadband download speed of 2 Mbps by 2012 as part of the government's universal service commitment. At least they don't call him a broadband czar.
And speaking of czars (what a clever follow-through), preliminary results from IMS Research's 2010 study on The World Market for set-top boxes and iDTVS shows that nearly 26 percent of EMEA's (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) set-top box shipments were deployed into Central and Eastern Europe in 2009 and that Russia led the way. There's the czar connection.
For more:
- see this coverage of the new Blizoo
- and this article on the UK's new broadband minister
- and this story on STB rankings
- and this Research and Markets release
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