Lietuva in brief - 2012-06-14

Google has gotten the go-ahead from Lithuania for its Street View application, an add-on to Google Maps, a company official said Thursday, reports AFP. Lithuanian officials were initially reluctant to proceed with the initiative due to privacy and security concerns, a complaint which Google had to previously contend with in other countries. “We will start the driving, that will take a couple of months probably and then it will take another couple of months until we can publish this imagery,” Ulf Spitzer, Google Street View program manager said on June 8 in Vilnius. Two Google cars equipped with video gear are to begin filming the picturesque streets of the Lithuania capital Vilnius before heading to other cities. Mayor of Vilnius Arturas Zuokas said he was pleased the project had got the go-ahead, saying it would help the capital’s international status and popularity.

The number of digital free-to-air TV channels available to viewers in Lithuania has started to shrink as the country moves to digitization, reports broadbandtvnews.com. Verslo Zinios reports that as of April there were a total of 14 such channels, though that fell to 13 at the end of the month following the encryption of Balticum TV. Commenting on the move, Virginijus Jurgelevicius, the director of Balticum TV, said that while it did not signal a further reduction in free channels, this could not be excluded as the Lithuanian ad market is not large enough to support so many such services. Nerijus Ivanauskas, the chief marketing officer at the incumbent telco TEO LT, added that 13 free channels was already a lot, bearing in mind that the other Baltic republics, Latvia and Estonia, had only four and five, respectively. Lithuania has set its analogue switch-off date as Oct. 29 this year.

The company Visaginas Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), which is implementing the Visaginas NPP project, is going to allocate around 3 million litas (700,000 euros) to the promotion of the project, reports ELTA. In recent weeks the media has been introduced to the promotion and information discussing the project’s benefits. According to company Director General Rimantas Vaitkus, the project has been in the public eye from the start and, as expected, will be publicized throughout the entire period of its implementation. He said that the Visaginas NPP’s promotion, as well as other work, is financed by the company. Currently, the public is being informed about the project via five major Lithuanian TV channels: LRT, LNK, TV3, Baltija and Lietuvos Rytas.