News:The pierced Titanic of German market - Kirch Media is generally happy with amount of bidders and their offers, flogging bits and pieces of the former empire left and right. Dresdner Bank has bought the right to sell KirchMedia's stake in Spanish broadcaster Telecinco. Mobile telco Vodafone is now the owner of the German soccer league broadcasts rights press reported last week. TF1 is interested to place E450 million Euro bid for Kirch's TV assets. Italian Mediaset would love to grab four ProSiebenSat1 owned channels too but they reckon the bids are too high. Meanwhile ProSiebenSat1 Media is eyeing Kirch's film library.

French press reports Canal Plus Technologies is about to change hands. Vivendi Universal wants to sell the company behind Mediaguard encryption to Thomson Multimedia for approximately 200 million Euros.
In the meantime in US Vivendi Universal and its former CEO, Jean Marie Messier, are accused of artificially inflating the price of their American Depository Shares to fund acquisitions for the past 3 years. The lawsuit has been filled already. It seems every time Vivendi finds a new source of funds another leakage opens elsewhere.

Valentinas Milaknis, Managing Director Lithuanian National Radio and TV revealed plans to start broadcasting Lithuanian programs via Sirius next year. Majority of the content would have English subtitles to "contribute to the promotion of Lithuania and its culture in Europe".

ARD and RTL launch the first MHP based interactive TV services in Germany.

People: Chairman of France Telecom Michel Bon has quit his position after seven years of ruling financially challenged telco.

On the funny note: Macau Cable TV hit hard by piracy wants to offer shares to the pirates in exchange for ceasing the distribution of illegal viewing cards to its subscribers.