PORT MORESBY (EM TV Business/Pacific Media Watch): The purchase and sales agreement has been signed between Fiji Television Limited and Telikom PNG Limited for Media Niugini Limited (MNL), making MNL now 100 percent Papua New Guinea owned.
The sale for US$10 million was announced by Fiji Television earlier this month.
Telikom PNG's chief executive Michael Donnelly says the purchase is "good news" for Papua New Guinea as EMTV continues to set a standard for local programme production, reports EMTV's Business PNG.
The recent start of competition into the Papua New Guinea media market providing solely digital television signals is a new step for the television medium in the country.
However, in a country like Papua New Guinea, with more than 80 percent of the population in rural areas and infrastructure severely lacking, the digital era still has far to go.
Telikom PNG plans to implement digital services to MNL's EM TV within the next 12 months, making EM TV the sole free-to-air broadcaster to use both digital and analogue services.
EMTV had been foreign-owned for 20 years with Fiji TV buying EMTV from Australia's Channel 9 in 2005 for US$1.6 million.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Pacific Media Watch
