Sogecable and Spanish Pay-TV
This report examines pay-TV developments in Spain where Digital+, Sogecable's DTH pay-TV service, has just celebrated its first birthday (Sogecable [2003-23]). Sogecable financial targets for 2005 are within reach. |
Media |
September 2004 Access this report
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ITV audience and NAR under the CRR Remedy
Weak Q2 commercial viewing figures fuelled stories that ITV1 NAR could be approximately £100 million lower in 2005 unless audience share rallied in H2 2004. This was due to the Contracts Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy, imposed by the Competition Commission as a condition for the merger of the Carlton and Granada sales houses to create ITV Sales, which now controls over 50% of television advertising sales. |
Media |
August 2004 Access this report
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ITV Licence Fees
Ofcom produced a tough and rigorous document on ITV licence fee renewals. Although the paper is dense and difficult to understand, we think it is bad news for ITV. The likely licence fee settlement is going to be higher than commentators might have expected six months ago. The prime reasons are Ofcom’s proposed move to assessing the ‘digital dividend’ on the basis of digital viewing, not households and, second, taxing the benefits of the lower costs of the merged ITV business. |
Media |
July 2004 Access this report
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Online Advertising Europe 2004
Online advertising outperformed other media in 2003 in the three biggest European markets of the UK, Germany and France, a trend which we expect to continue in 2004-06. Paid search has been the principal driver of growth in the UK market (up 70% in 2003), but interest of advertisers has cooled as steep price rises have reduced its cost effectiveness as a customer acquisition tool. Paid search is taking off in France and Germany, and will fuel growth in 2004-06. |
Media |
July 2004 Access this report
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UK Broadband Market H1 2004
UK broadband take-up continued to be strong in H1 2004, with an estimated 1.1 million new home and business broadband subscribers expanding the base to 4.2 million. Take-up is being aided by aggressive price competition - many ISPs are now offering broadband packages below the critical price point of £20/month - and relentless marketing campaigns as the 'land grab' for subscribers continues. |
Telecoms |
June 2004 Access this report
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Analogue Switch-Off
The structure of the UK broadcasting industry will be hugely influenced by the timing of the analogue switch-off. It will particularly affect ITV, whose licence fee is set by reference to the percentage of the population able to receive digital signals. |
Media |
June 2004 Access this report
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Global Games Market
The unveiling of new handheld gamers at E3, the games industry's annual gathering in Los Angeles, has resuscitated interest in the fast maturing market for handheld gamers. Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP), Nintendo's dual-screen GameBoy and Nokia's redesigned N-Gage QD are major product plays for companies that must each prove themselves again to be innovative or continue to decline. |
Media |
June 2004 Access this report
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3G in Japan
Although 3G mobile networks are being rolled out aggressively in Japan, instead of the promised land of increased voice and data revenue driving higher profits, revenue is stagnant and costs are rising. In this report we examine why and consider the lessons to be learned for European operators.
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Mobile, Telecoms |
June 2004 Access this report
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UK Digital TV Platform Growth
UK digital TV (DTV) growth is rocketing ahead, but how fast? Ofcom and BARB – the two ‘official’ sources – agree that growth has been faster since Q4 2003 and that Freeview is the main reason, but are issuing increasingly divergent estimates. Ofcom is, in our view, overestimating Freeview and BSkyB homes. We prefer BARB's methods and rely on its estimate of 48.1% of UK TV homes (11.7 million DTV homes). |
Media |
June 2004 Access this report
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French Broadband Market
The take-off of local loop unbundling in H2 2003 enabled France to record the highest rate of broadband market growth in 2003 in Europe. This torrid pace of growth continued in Q1 2004 due to retail price declines and 50% rises in ISP ad budgets year-on-year. Free, Neuf, Cegetel, Telecom Italia, Tiscali are offering LLU-based DSL offers, bundled in most cases with telephony. |
Telecoms |
June 2004 Access this report
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Cable & Wireless: UK vs. the 'exotics'
This report examines the medium-term prospects for Cable & Wireless. In 2003, analysts sensed a new dawn for C&W following the arrival of new management and the company's exit from the US. |
Telecoms |
May 2004 Access this report
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UK Mobile User Survey
In this report we update our regular survey of UK mobile users, with the latest survey conducted in April 2004. We look at user penetration, handset replacement rates, camera phone ownership and use, and also the market share prospects and camera phone usage for the mobile network operators.
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Mobile, Telecoms |
May 2004 Access this report
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Happy Birthday iTunes
Happy Birthday iTunes! It is just over a year since Apple launched iTunes and the media continues to talk up the second coming of the music industry, whose saviour appears in the form of affable Steve Jobs. iTunes sold a total of 70 million tracks online in its first year, well below its target of 100 million, but a respectable showing, especially since it spawned a small flock of competitors determined to out-sell iTunes. |
Media |
May 2004 Access this report
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Local Loop Unbundling in the UK
Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) has been a failure in the UK, with BT maintaining a stranglehold on the wholesale supply of DSL connections. But in other European countries, LLU has helped provide competition to the incumbent PTT and acted as a catalyst for the development of new services, such as voice-over-broadband and TV-over-DSL, and generally brought prices down. |
Fixed line |
May 2004 Access this report
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Canal Plus and French Pay-TV
This in-depth report on pay-TV in France charts the course of Canal Plus and its main, but much smaller, competitor, TPS, over the period 2004-06. We anticipate pay-TV penetration will rise from 35% in 2003 to 38.7% by 2006, driven mainly by aggressive competition between TPS and Canal Plus in an improving economic environment. |
Media |
May 2004 Access this report
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UK Online Console Gaming
This report updates our readers on the disappointing advance of online console gaming in the UK. Although the UK is the third largest video games market in the world, and was the first country in Europe to offer online gaming for Xbox and PS2, we estimate only 90,000 UK online console gamers at the end of Q1 2004 (just over 1% of 128-bit consoles sold to date). |
Media |
April 2004 Access this report
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UK Commercial Radio
Modest progress has been made towards consolidation in commercial radio since we last reported on the issue in mid-2003. Although the new Communications Act has liberalised the ownership rules, the potential blocking role of the Competition Commission continues to be a restraining factor in the wake of the Galaxy/Vibe ruling. That ruling found that anti-competitive outcomes could emerge even if the ownership rules were respected and it has had a chilling effect on M&A activity. |
Media |
April 2004 Access this report
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Voice-over-IP
Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) is a fashionable topic and this report provides our assessment about whether the mass market potential in Europe matches the rhetoric of enthusiasts or the experience of the United States. In other words, does VoIP represent a fundamental threat to the continent's (and the UK's) incumbent telecoms operators, which still dominate the fixed telephony business? In our view, VoIP in Europe has quite a limited potential for consumers in general although business applications will expand significantly. |
Fixed line |
April 2004 Access this report
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Music Publishing 2004
We expect the music publishing market to grow from $3.7 billion in 2003 to $5 billion in 2010. Performance, mobile phone ring tone and synchronisation revenues will be the most important drivers of growth in the near term, with legitimate downloads becoming significant in the medium-term (a big if given piracy, but one that we still are confident about). These will offset the expected decline in mechanical copyright revenues derived from physical sales of recorded music, as volumes continue to fall. |
Media |
April 2004 Access this report
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E-Recruitment and Regional Newspapers
A new menace hangs over the future of regional newspapers, an industry already suffering from declining display advertising and paid circulation. Starting with the NHS Electronic Recruitment Programme (ERP) launched this month, we expect the public sector will shift recruitment activity to its own sites, in the wider context of e-Government objectives to bring all services online by 2005. |
Media |
March 2004 Access this report
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