MUMBAI: News Corp chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has sold his entire Class A non-voting shares to retain his voting stake in the company.

As per regulatory filings, Murdoch sold 418,631 shares on 20 November for more than $10 million at $23.87 to $24.01 per share.

The sale was for estate-planning purposes, reported Bloomberg quoting a source.

The Murdoch family holds 12 per cent but its dual class shareholding structure gives it 40 per cent of the voting power.

It needs to be noted that Murdoch was facing stiff opposition from News Corp shareholders, some of who had proposed sweeping changes to make the management more accountable particularly in the wake of phone hacking scandal in the company?s UK publishing unit.

The investors had also criticised the dual-class structure during the annual general meeting which gives Murdoch family undue power to take their agenda forward.

The company?s Class A shares fell less than 1 percent to $23.82 at the close in New York.

MUMBAI: UK media watchdog Ofcom has imposed a financial penalty of ?40,000 on E! Entertainment UK.

This penalty follows Ofcom?s finding, published on 23 April 2012 in Broadcast Bulletin 204 relating to the broadcast of consecutive episodes of Girls of the Playboy Mansion at various times during the day on 27 December 2011.

The content of these episodes included material which was unsuitable for pre-watershed broadcast and the episodes were broadcast during the Christmas holiday period, when it was likely that children ? some unaccompanied by an adult - would have been watching. The broadcaster was found in breach of Rule 1.3:

According to Rule 1.3, children must also be protected by appropriate scheduling from material that is unsuitable for them.

Before the broadcast on 27 December 2011 of Girls of the Playboy Mansion, which was subject to this sanction, E! had also previously been found in breach for two programmes, which were also unsuitable for broadcast before the watershed because the nature of the content and because the most offensive language was broadcast (Broadcast Bulletin 195).

Ofcom decided that the Code breach of Rule 1.3 recorded in Broadcast Bulletin 204 was serious and repeated and, therefore, a financial penalty should be imposed.

MUMBAI: In just a single lifetime, humans have changed the face of planet Earth on a scale unimaginable to our predecessors.

Generation Earth, a three-part documentary series by UK pubcaster BBC‘s BBC One channel, for the first time charts the epic scale of our re-design of the planet and how humans have transformed the planet.

‘Generation Earth‘ traces the spectacular story of how humans have changed our world in a single generation.

In this series, Dallas Campbell travels the globe, visiting the world‘s largest and most ambitious engineering projects, exploring the power of human ingenuity and the making of the modern world.

In 1980, the tallest building on the planet was the Sears Towers in Chicago and Dubai was a dusty strip of desert with a single highway. Fast forward 30 years and the world‘s tallest building stands at more than 800 metres in Dubai, cities like Las Vegas have sprawled across the desert and are home to millions, and China is the manufacturing capital of the world, with many of the fastest growing cities on earth.

Throughout the series Dallas undertakes some extraordinary feats - from cleaning the windows of the world‘s tallest building - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, to scuba-diving in raw sewage in Mexico City, in order to unblock the turbines driving the mega-city‘s failing sewage system. He also flies a replica of the Wright Brother‘s glider from 1902, paraglides over the world‘s largest greenhouse array and travels to a cosmodrome on the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, to witness a new age of space travel.

Dallas said: "The way we live on the planet is changing in ways that our ancestors would have thought impossible. Telling that story has been utterly absorbing and fascinating and by far the most ambitious and demanding project I‘ve ever worked on. I‘ve had privileged access to the some of the world‘s defining engineering projects - projects that are re-shaping the planet, and the chance to experience first-hand some of the extraordinary innovations that allow us to live the way we now do."

In the first episode, Dallas looks at how we are building faster than ever before.

In episode two, he explores how we are shrinking the planet, transforming our transport networks, and moving more objects around the globe faster.

In the final episode, Dallas examines what it takes to keep seven billion of us alive, in terms of energy, food and water.

Drawing on satellite imagery, CGI and specialist filming, the series provides a new view on the world and compresses time to watch a generation of change pass in a few moments. Multiple time?lapse cameras track the progress of the biggest construction projects underway today, from bare rock to engineering marvels. Each an emblem of a global trend, together they capture the sheer scale of human ambition to remake the planet. Filmed in HD, Generation Earth invokes the stunning and sometimes terrible beauty of the man-made world.

MUMBAI: The Commercial Broadcasters Association (COBA) in the UK has released a report stating that its members invested more than ?600 million in UK content in 2011, of which nearly ?500 million was first run.

Investment in UK content has increased by more than ?140 million since 2009. Over a third of originated content investment goes towards supporting the independent production sector.

Almost 70 per cent of independent investment is spent with smaller producers. Almost 9,000 people are employed by Coba members in the UK. UK employment has increased by more than 1,000 people since 2009. Spend on non-domestic channels based in the UK contribute around ?400 million to the UK economy.

Coba members contributed ?4.2 billion in total in Gross Value Added to the UK economy in 20111. In addition to the investment made directly by the UK channel businesses, further investment into UK content is made by other companies in multinational groups. Coba members invested in excess of ?60 million in UK content at group level in 2011, not captured in the expenditure of the UK channel businesses.

The UK is the leading European media hub for Coba members. In addition to their UK channel businesses, much of their European operations are based and broadcast out of the UK. Non-domestic channels targeted at other European markets are much more likely to be situated in the UK than any other European country.

Coba members spent almost ?2.2 billion on content investment in 2011. Of this, just under a third (?623 million) was spent on UK content in the form of in-house productions, external commissioning of originated content and co-productions.

In addition, there was investment in UK secondary rights, i.e. the purchase of rights to broadcast repeats of content commissioned by other broadcasters and previously aired on other channels. Investment also goes into reversioning of non-UK content ? both English spoken and non-English spoken - to adapt it to the UK broadcast market.

The direct impact of Coba members on the UK economy in 2011 was just over ?2.1 billion. The direct impact can broadly be divided into investment in UK content, operational costs, wages and taxes. Investment in UK channels was just over ?1.7bn in 2011, of which more than a third was investment in content and a further half on wages and other operating costs. Spend on non-UK channels based in the UK, in the form of cash expenditure and wages, contributed another ?0.4 billion.

Investment in new UK children?s commissions (in-house, external and co-productions) rose from ?16 million in 2009 to ?25.5 million with investment in secondary UK rights rising from ?1.7 million in 2009 to ?3.1million in 2011. Coba members employ around 9,000 people in the UK.

Employment grew by over 1,000 between 2009 and 2011. There are two sources of employment within the UK ? the UK channel businesses themselves, but also non-UK channels that are based and broadcast out of the UK. In addition, for some non-UK channels broadcast outside the UK, the majority of staff is still located in UK media centres.

The majority of jobs are with the UK channels, although employment related to non-UK channels has seen even higher growth. The wage bill for these employees paid in the UK came to almost ?500 million in 2011, with around a fifth of this for employees on non-UK channels. Using employment multipliers, in addition to the nearly 9,000 people employed directly by Coba members, their activities and direct investment are estimated to have supported additional employment of almost 47,000 people in their supply chains. These people in turn support further employment across the UK through their spending of wages on goods and services.