Bt In Talks With Kirch Group
The news of plans to introduce satellite home shopping and banking services in Germany came as Deutsche Telekom confirmed that it was about to pull out of MMBG, the German digital pay-TV consortium in which it owns a 27 per cent interest.
The decision of MMBG's main shareholder to quit the project means it is now on the verge of collapse. Telekom plans to develop its own pay-TV marketing operation based around its existing cable network.
Telekom said it would explain its decision on Thursday to MMBG's other shareholders, which include Bertelsmann, the German media group, Canal Plus of France, several of Germany's public sector broadcast networks and Debis, a unit of Daimler Benz.
MMBG was set up last year to establish a technological standard for the decoders needed to receive digitally-transmitted television signals and to create a uniform broadcasting platform and billing mechanism. Telekom is understood to have made its decision after it became clear that MMBG had failed to meet these aims.
The German pay-TV market was split earlier this year when Munich-based Kirch launched a rival decoder system to the one being developed by MMBG. Telekom is now believed to be working on its own decoder to be used with its cable television network which reaches 16m households. The network is in the process of being digitalised, an operation which is scheduled to be completed next year. Then, according to Telekom, the cable network will be able to offer 150 channels.
The talks between BT and Kirch would involve a joint venture with DF1, the digital satellite company which launched 19 channels of digital television in July. BSkyB, the >