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AMSTERDAM: Taco Ketelaar, the former chief creative officer of 2waytraffic—and co-founder of the Dutch company that is now owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment—is taking up the role of CEO at the BlazHoffski Group. Ketelaar becomes CEO of the company, based in …

NEW YORK: Jerry Trainor and Jennette McCurdy, two of the stars of Nickelodeon’s hit series iCarly, will headline the kids’ channel’s new original movie Best Player, slated for a 2010 premiere. Shooting is to take place in Vancouver beginning October 24 …

LOS ANGELES/MILAN: Atlantyca Entertainment is teaming up with the Gotham Group for the film version of Italian publisher Edizioni Piemme’s book series Century. The Century book series, recently launched in the U.S. by Random House, is written by Italian author Pierdomenico Baccalario. …

NEW YORK: Sean "Diddy" Combs is looking for a new personal assistant in a second season of I Want to Work for Diddy, which launches on VH1 on November 2.  The show watches as a new batch of 11 contestants …

LONDON: ZenithOptimedia has downgraded its 2009 ad forecast, predicting an overall 9.9 percent decline (as compared with the previously reported 8.5 percent), but has somewhat rosier expectations for the second half of the year, with a "clear improvement in the …

BURBANK: The Time I…, an original short-form series that features kid viewers sharing real stories of important milestones in their lives, is set to premiere on Disney Channel on November 8. The interstitial segments, each about one to two minutes …

LONDON: Darlow Smithson Productions has been commissioned by TLC to produce Plane Crash Survivors, a one-off documentary that tells the stories of people who have survived aviation disasters.  The 45-minute project uses archive footage of actual crashes, interviews with the …

LAUSANNE: The International Olympic Committee has reached a multiplatform deal with ELTA Technology for the broadcast rights to the 2010 Winter Games in Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). The deal, which also covers the 1st Summer Youth Olympic Games in Singapore in 2010, grants …

LONDON: Endemol has secured its first third-party distribution deal in Russia, taking on the rights for Fashion Court, Let’s Get Married and Pride of the Nation throughout Central and Eastern Europe. All three original entertainment formats are from Moscow-based Red …

BURBANK: Three former Film Roman executives have set up Bento Box Entertainment, a new production firm that is already at work on an animated prime-time series for Twentieth Century Fox Television, Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks Animation. Bento Box Entertainment aims to …