LONDON: free digital reign.

In the film “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey plays a cable television installer who goes to great lengths to befriend a customer, giving him a free, unauthorized service upgrade. In the real world, American cable companies may be less eager to please, but nonetheless they dominate the pay-TV and broadband businesses.

In Europe, by contrast, “in most countries we are still the little guy,” said Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global, which owns cable networks in a number of European countries, as well as Asia, Australia and Latin America. But now the European cable business wants to raise its profile, with Liberty Global and other investors trying to persuade consumers, content providers, competitors and regulators alike that the cable guys are on their side.

“Usually the cable company is the one thats providing the innovation in the market,” Fries said. “But as an industry, we are probably under-represented and underappreciated in Europe.”

Actually, the size of the cable business, as well as the level of innovation, varies widely from market to market across Europe. More European households - about 63 million - get their pay-TV from cable than from any other source.

But in countries like Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where cable is nearly ubiquitous, it is largely in the form of old-fashioned analogue connections. Less than one-quarter of European cable TV connections are digital, compared with about half of those in the United States, according to Forrester Research.

Even in markets where cable is predominantly digital, like Britain, cable has been left behind by satellite and free, over-the-air digital TV systems. Meanwhile, telecommunications companies have been more successful than cable companies at selling European customers bundled services like broadband, telephone calls and digital television.

“While cable is the dominant television technology throughout the region, there has been a lot of difficulty upgrading it to digital,” said Ted Hall, an analyst at Informa Telecoms Media, a research company.

After a round of consolidation fueled by private equity deal makers, analysts have said that European cable companies may be in a better position to make the investments in networks, content and marketing that could help them compete with telecommunications and satellite companies.

Last year alone, the three leading cable operators in France merged into one nationwide provider, Numericable, and the two biggest cable companies in Britain got together to form a company now called Virgin Media. Another operator with national scale was formed a year earlier when a Spanish cable company, Ono, acquired the cable operations of a telecommunications company, Auna.

Private equity has taken an active role in the consolidation, with several of these companies helping to finance the deal in Spain. Private equity firms also control Numericable and the leading cable company in Germany, Kabel Deutschland, along with smaller operators in a number of other countries.

Liberty Global, a spinoff from the media empire of the American cable entrepreneur John Malone, has also been busy. It recently pulled out of France, Sweden and Norway, markets where analysts said it had little hope of building a dominant position, but it acquired market leaders in Switzerland and Ireland, among other acquisitions.

There has been speculation that Liberty Global, the largest international cable business, might be interested in building up its European presence by acquiring Virgin Media, which put itself up for sale in July but put the process on hold in August amid the turbulence in financial markets.

“Well see if that asset becomes available again and then look at it if it does,” Fries said. “It has some interesting attributes.

“Were also examining opportunities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And in certain markets in Western Europe, well take a look at things that come available.”

Analysts have identified Germany as potentially attractive to Liberty Global, since recent developments have suggested that a long-awaited consolidation of this most fragmented of European cable markets is under way.

While the number of cable operators has been whittled down to one in several European markets, an estimated 4,000 companies are involved in the business in Germany, according to Cable Europe, a trade group. Three of them, known as Level 3 operators, own much of the network infrastructure and some connections to consumers; most of the rest, called Level 4 providers, operate only the final link from, say, an apartment building to a customers home.

Regulators created this separation in an effort to limit the power of Deutsche Telekom, which originally built the cable network but was not allowed direct access to customers. Deutsche Telekom was later required to sell the network, which is now in the hands of Kabel Deutschland, Unity Media and Kabel Baden-Wьrttemberg.

MOSCOW: A Russian court has frozen all shares of Russneft, the oil producer controlled by the billionaire Mikhail Gutseriev, the government said Wednesday, pending a criminal investigation into Gutseriev.

He has asserted that a campaign against him is a pretext to the Kremlins continued nationalization of the energy industry.

The shares were frozen by the Lefortovsky District Court in Moscow, the Interior Ministry said. Gutseriev is accused of “illegal entrepreneurship” and tax evasion, charges he has denied.

The Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska is seeking to buy Russneft. “This doesnt impact our plans,” said Sergei Rybak, a spokesman for Deripaskas holding company. Deripaska, whose interests range from aluminum to banking, has been picked by the Kremlin to help develop the Black Sea resort of Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

No one at Russneft in Moscow could be reached immediately for comment.

Russian state-owned energy companies have taken control of oil and natural gas projects from Royal Dutch Shell and BP in the past year after claims of environmental, tax and regulatory violations. The tax authorities, prosecutors and Interior Ministry officials have been investigating Gutseriev and Russneft managers for two years, Gutseriev said in a letter published by the newspaper Vedomosti last month.

Gutseriev said he would sell Russneft, the company he founded in 2002, because of attacks on the company and management by state agencies.

In the letter, he maintained that regulatory pressure on both foreign and domestic producers was serving as a pretext to expropriate oil and natural gas property privatized in the 1990s.

“They made me an offer to leave the oil business, to leave on good terms, ” Gutseriev wrote in the letter, which was also published in Vedomosti. “I refused. Then, to make me more amenable, they tightened the screws on the company with unprecedented persecution. Who didnt check us in the past two years!”

Russnefts board accepted Gutserievs resignation as chief executive on July 30 and named Oleg Gordeev, senior vice president of Russneft, as acting head of the company. In a statement to the Russian news media, Gutseriev later said he had not been pressured into selling his company.

(08-17) 11:41 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) —

Stocks soared Friday after the Federal Reserve did what Wall Street was clamoring for and cut its key discount rate a half percentage point. The move quelled investors’ credit worries at least for the time being and sent the Dow Jones industrials up more than 160 points.

The Fed Д which had resisted lowering rates despite weeks of market volatility, and instead added nearly $120 billion in liquidity into the banking system Д cut its discount rate to 5.75 percent from 6.25 percent. The Fed acknowledged that the stock market turbulence that has pulled the Dow by hundreds of points a day was posing a risk to economic growth.

“People were kind of baiting the Fed into doing something, and finally they did,” said Philip Dow, managing director of equity trading at RBC Dain Rauscher. “The playground monitor finally showed up, and it showed someone cares and someone is bringing rationality into the market.”

But the central bank made no mention of lowering its target for the federal funds rate, which has stood at 5.25 percent for more than a year. The fed funds rate determines the rates that banks charge each other for loans, while the discount rate only covers loans the Fed makes to banks. Many strategists believe the market won’t settle down until the Fed lowers the fed funds rate target, considered a more significant benchmark.

If the market doesn’t get that rate cut, Friday’s gains may not stick, especially since it’s likely there will be plenty more news in the coming days and weeks of further troubles in the lending industry. Any mention of problems at subprime lenders or funds that invested in mortgages has sent stocks skidding, and so have worries that tighter credit will stanch the flood of takeovers, which sent Wall Street to new highs earlier this year.

Still, the Fed made it clear this wasn’t the only step it would take if the volatility continued. In its statement, the Fed said it “is prepared to act as needed.”

In early afternoon trading, the Dow Jones industrial average surged 161.19, or 1.25 percent, to 13,006.97.

Trading was still fairly volatile, though. The Dow shot up more than 300 points within the first 10 minutes of trading, but then lost about half those gains. The blue chip index is still about 7 percent below its record close of 14,000.41 reached July 19, and is down about 2 percent on the week.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 27.38, or 1.94 percent, to 1,438.65, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 43.38, or 1.77 percent, to 2,494.45.

Bonds slipped as stocks rose, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note rising to 4.67 percent from 4.66 percent late Thursday.

Traders who bet on how the Fed might alter rates now expect the central bank will lower the benchmark fed funds rate at its next meeting on Sept. 18. Some investors are hoping for a cut in that benchmark rate even sooner.

“If the cut in the discount rate succeeds in restoring confidence, then perhaps there is no need for the Fed to cut rates at the Sept. 18 meeting,” said John Lonski, chief economist of Moody’s Investor Service. He added, though, that the key line in the Fed’s statement Friday was its willingness to take more steps to prevent market volatility from harming the economy.

“That means the Fed is prepared to make a rate cut if stability doesn’t come,” Lonski said.

Gains were seen in all sectors of the stock market, but financial stocks, which have been battered by the growing problems in mortgage lending, saw particularly heavy buying. Dow component JPMorgan Chase & Co. rose 4 percent, while Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers rose more than 6 percent. Morgan Stanley gained more than 5 percent.

The pummeled stocks of mortgage lenders also saw significant increases. The most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, and one of its biggest percentage gainers, was Countrywide Financial Corp. The home mortgage lender rose $2.08, or 10.98 percent, to $21.03.

Major European indexes recovered substantially after the Fed’s announcement from steep declines in earlier trading. Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 3.50 percent, Germany’s DAX index rose 1.49 percent, and France’s CAC-40 rose 1.86 percent.

In Asian trading, which closed before the Fed lowered the discount rate, Japan’s Nikkei stock average plunged 5.42 percent as the yen continued its climb against the dollar. The dollar briefly dipped below 112 yen for the first time in over a year, suggesting that some investors were taking their Japanese currency out of higher-yielding dollar assets.

The dollar was mixed against other major currencies. Gold prices jumped.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by about 7 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where volume came to 1.74 billion shares.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies added 19.08, or 2.48 percent, to 787.82.

Oil prices rose 87 cents to $71.87 a barrel. Traders have been tracking the path of Hurricane Dean, which is threatening to head west into the Gulf of Mexico, where many oil installations are located.

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