Video Age International October 2015

6 World October 2015 V I D E O A G E (Continued on Page 8) Africa Gets Its Own Sex and the City F ive ambitious and glamorous women who return to Ghana’s capital of Accra after living overseas are at the center of An African City , being described as Africa’s own Sex and the City . The web series, which premiered last year on youtube. com/anafricancity, was seen as a challenge to the narrative of an impoverished African woman, dealing with war, poverty and famine. The first season’s 10 episodes have been viewed nearly two million times and have been dubbed into French and aired on Canal Afrique. The first season is also currently available in the U.S. on Hulu. The second season will air early in 2016. Bolloré Expands Vivendi A fter increasing his stake in Canal Plus to 15 percent, 63-year-old Vincent Bolloré of France’s Vivendi has secured more voting rights in order to better transform the group into a content enterprise. Vivendi owns Canal Plus, Universal Music Group and the German production and distribution company Tandem. Recently, the group acquired 80 percent of video-streaming site Dailymotion from French wireless operator Orange and increased its share of Telecom Italia to 14.9 percent, becoming the telco’s largest shareholder. Telecom Italia’s OTT platform, TimVision, will be carrying the Netflix streaming service into Italy. Bolloré invested four billion euro to acquire 14.5 percent of Vivendi’s shares and has thus doubled his voting rights. Vivendi has more than 10 billion euro in cash to spend for acquisitions, however Bolloré has admitted that finding the right acquisition targets at the right price isn’t easy. T he annual report on the state of Greek television came out during the last MIP-TV, courtesy of Athens-based distribution company J.T. TV-Film International. According to the 21-page report, TV advertising revenues in 2014 reached a total of 644 million euro. This compares to 571 million in the previous year. One particularly interesting development is that for the period of January-February 2014, TV ad revenues were 86 million euro. In the same two months of 2015, they jumped to 104 million. In terms of TV average audience share for the period October 2014-March 2015, Antenna made it to the number one spot with 16.67 percent, closely followed by Alpha with 16.63, and Mega with 16.4 percent. Star came fourth with 10.08 percent, followed by Skai (8.12); public station Nerit, formerly ERT (5.05); Epsilon (4.26), Sport Plus (1.54) and Maked (0.9). No More Grexit for Greek TV: Despite Hardship, TV Passed The Austerity Test