Top Stories

CANNES, October 16: PorchLight Entertainment secured a number of new international sales for its action thriller movie Hell’s Rain at MIPCOM last week. Hell’s Rain, which uses a natural disaster as its underlying theme, has been sold to TF1 in …

LOS ANGELES, October 16: Playboy TV has launched Playboy Prime, a new daily prime-time format featuring short-form programming that is designed to appeal to the “YouTube Generation,” its key 18- to 34-year-old male viewer demographic. Airing every night from 8 …

MIAMI, October 15: MTV Latin America’s sixth annual music event, Los Premios MTV Latin America 2007, airing on Thursday, October 18, will reach more than 270 million households in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. In Latin America, Los Premios …

LONDON, October 15: Endemol UK, in association with Mobstar Media, has been commissioned to produce a made-for-mobile thriller, Cell, due to premiere on O2’s mobile network in December. Cell tells two parallel stories about the same man: One involves him …

CANNES/MUNICH, October 15: ZDF and the Tele München Group (TMG) are teaming up for a new adaptation of Jack London’s classic adventure novel The Seawolf, which will air as a two-part mini-series on Austrian broadcaster ORF. The new adaptation follows …

SYDNEY, October 15: BBC Worldwide Australasia has licensed nearly 100 hours of factual and lifestyle content to Australia’s home- and garden-themed HOW TO Channel. In gardening fare, new series licensed to the HOW TO Channel include the 10×25-minute James Martin …

NEW YORK/MALIBU, October 15: Nickelodeon & Viacom Consumer Products has granted the master toy license for SpongeBob SquarePants to JAKKS Pacific, who will create toys and related products based on the hit Nickelodeon animated series, for launch in 2008. JAKKS …

SILVER SPRING, October 15: Discovery Communications has reached a deal to acquire HowStuffWorks, an online informational tool that is accessed by 11 million unique visitors from around the world every month. Located at www.howstuffworks.com, the site’s traffic has grown 25 …

LOS ANGELES, October 15: Fox Television Studios has made three key hires for its programming department: Pancho Mansfield, Diego Suarez and Karyn Smith. Pancho Mansfield has been named senior VP of programming, after serving as executive VP and head of …

SYDNEY, October 15: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has granted the Australian broadcast rights to the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 Olympic Games to Nine Network and FOXTEL. The rights to the Beijing games are held by Seven Network. Commenting …