TV consumers in Austria must pay higher taxes from Friday. The ORF licence fee increases by seven per cent as of 1 June. The rise was agreed on last November when ORF general director Alexander Wrabetz justified it as “moderate”. Political decision-makers and telecommunications regulation authority KommAustria gave the go-ahead to the disputed tax hike. […]
Peter Schöber has said that market shares should be a negligible aspect for ORF III. Schöber – who co-heads the new channel in cooperation with Helmut Kaiser – said: “Our programme attracts up to 400,000 people a day but, to be honest, I do not care about market shares a lot. (…) Quality should matter […]
A German music television broadcaster has disclosed plans to introduce Austrian contents. Viva officials said yesterday (Weds) they wanted to add more music by Austrian artists to the programme soon. The plan is to set up Viva Austria, a specialised programme which screens Austrian chart shows on the same channel as Viva. Around 15 per […]
Social Democratic (SPÖ) Chancellor Werner Faymann considers a reform of national broadcaster ORF’s Stiftungsrat for the foreseeable future. The Stiftungsrat is a council with 35 members which has a function similar to a supervisory board. It is widely seen as an essential tool to Austria’s parties when it comes to trying to make themselves heard […]
The People’s Party (ÖVP) has appealed to ORF bosses to rethink their intention to relocate the broadcaster’s headquarters. ORF general director Alexander Wrabetz is understood to be keen on building a new ORF head office in Vienna-Landstraße. The state-funded broadcasting corporation has its headquarters in the Viennese district of Hietzing at the moment. The building […]
The ORF’s market share keeps decreasing. Media consumption researchers found that the national broadcaster ORF 1 channel had a market share of 15.8 per cent last month. This is an improvement of 0.8 per cent compared to the same time span in 2011. The slight increase was tarnished by the worsening popularity of ORF 2. […]
ATV has been robbed of its standing as Austria’s most popular private TV station. Puls 4 overtook its key rival for the first time in four years thanks to a market share of 3.2 per cent last month. ATV garnered a stake of three per cent, according to TV consumption research released yesterday (Thurs). ServusTV, […]
Richard Lugner has praised Brigitte Nielsen as the “nicest Opera Ball guest I have ever had.” The Danish model and actress accepted the 79-year-old Viennese businessman’s invitation to this year’s Viennese State Opera Ball. Around 5,000 people will attend the glamorous event tonight (Thurs). TV channel ORF will screen all the action from the red […]
Parliament speaker Barbara Prammer has branded suggestions to restore the state budget without any tax increases as “illusory”. The Social Democrat (SPÖ) – who reportedly considers running for president in 2016 – told the Kurier that “the weak have to be protected”. Prammer stressed she did not want to give her point of view on […]
The Upper Austrian municipality of Kronstorf is waiting for search engine giant Google to start building a data centre for which Google had bought 75 hectares of land three years ago. National broadcaster ORF reported that the decision to build at Kronstorf was made by Google partly because the company wants to use only renewable […]