Francisco Partners, a San Francisco, California-based private equity firm focused on investments in technology-based companies, has made a binding offer to Technicolor for the acquisition of the Grass Valley Broadcast & Professional business activities.

Ross Video Limited and Codan Limited have jointly announced that Ross has entered into a letter of intent to buy 100% of the shares of Codan's wholly-owned Melbourne-based subsidiary, Codan Broadcast Products Pty Ltd. The sale, subject only to the finalisation of due diligence, is scheduled for completion on 31 August 2010.

Ross plans to continue operations from Codan Broadcast's current premises in Melbourne, Australia with the name of the business and product branding changing to Ross Video. Codan Broadcast products will become part of the Ross product portfolio.

Wohler Technologies has opened a new service centre serving customers in the EMEA territory. Based in France, the Wohler EMEA service centre will act as the first line of second- and third-tier support for Wohler customers, not only enabling faster turnaround times, but also simplifying administrative paperwork and shipping procedures. First-tier support and administrative tasks, such as RMA requests, will continue to be handled by staff at Wohler's US headquarters.

CSR plc has announced the acquisition of Belfast-based APT Licensing Ltd, following a successful three year collaboration under the CSR eXtension Partner Programme, which saw APT's professional quality audio compression brought to consumers on CSR's wireless audio platforms.

Envivio has secured $15 million in a mezzanine investment from venture capital and banking sources enabling the company to extend its position in the video over IP market. Driven by record unit orders delivering unrivaled numbers of video channels worldwide, Envivio is experiencing 100% year-over-year sales growth.

Sales of Blu-ray players in Europe are set to reach a new record high in 2010. Around 4.6 million units will be sold in EU member states, more than doubling the previous figure (+110%), according to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO). It predicts that sales of Blu-ray players will rise by 49% to 770 million Euros. EITO believes that the upward trend will continue into 2011.

GlobeCast has announced that its international fibre network, newly renamed the GlobeCast Backbone Network, now offers broadcasters the ability to not only reach new markets, but to connect to major bouquet operators, broadcasters, playout facilities, media centers and teleports worldwide. The network now reaches 32 points-of-presence around the globe including, most recently, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo.

Latens and Viditec S.A have signed a partnership agreement. The focus of this partnership agreement will be that Viditec will represent Latens Systems software CAS for all networks and ECO middleware with pre-integrated CAS in Argentina.

Snell has announced the opening of a new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility dedicated to the company's rapidly growing line of professional broadcast routing switchers. The new plant is located in close proximity to the router research and development team in Reading, UK, to better leverage Snell's base of expertise in router technology and expedite new product launches.

Quantel has announced that Thomas Birner, director of sales for Central Europe, has also been appointed director of sales for the Middle East. In his newly expanded role, Birner is responsible for building Quantel's market presence throughout the Middle East alongside his existing responsibility for Central Europe.