Homepage

The Premier League has succeeded in obtaining a 4.4% increase in live televised rights payments from £1,706 million to £1,782 million for the next three year contract commencing with the 2010/11 football season

The big surprise was that Sky bid more than last time round (by an estimated factor of circa 7.5% for its current four packages), while Setanta bid roughly 20% less for its two packages, thereby losing one to Sky

The highly contrasting bidding approaches appear to reflect completely different mindsets, with the not yet viable Setanta focused on the economic value of the PL rights, and Sky taken up with demonstrating long-term commitment to the PL

The essential conclusion of Ofcom’s Second Public Service Broadcasting Review is that the present commercial PSB model is unsustainable in the digital age. The Ofcom solution of fixing on Channel 4 as the “alternative, commercial PSB voice”, while freeing up the Channel 3 and 5 licensees from most of their PSB obligations, still leaves a major funding gap

A particularly attractive solution is some kind of synergy-generating merger/JV/partnership, but difficult to achieve in practice. The attached note examines the main issues that we may expect to arise with the existing proposals

Kangaroo – the proposed BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 video-on-demand (VOD) service – has been terminated by the Competition Commission (CC) due to fears that it could control the wholesale and retail supply of UK TV VOD

In our view the CC decision is a lucky escape for all three shareholders since it will save them from investing potentially tens of millions in an ill-advised venture which could have become a bottomless money pit when they can least afford it

Near term ITV and Channel 4 will refocus their internet strategies around their own portals and online syndication deals, but these are unlikely to deliver significant revenue; Marquee – the BBC’s proposition to open up iPlayer to other PSB broadcasters – could help, with the advantage of being very low cost

Vodafone’s December quarter KPIs showed only slightly worse underlying European revenue growth compared to last quarter, with another plummet in growth in Spain moderated by improving figures in Germany

In the context of GDP growth across its markets being considerably worse, this is a relatively good performance, with its market share loss likely to prove less severe than last quarter

However, its growth is still very substantially worse than earlier in the year, even compared to GDP, and with GDP declines set to worsen through 2009, and termination rate cuts to bite again in the second half of 2009, growth is likely to decline further

BT Retail is putting through another round of residential price changes, trading further aggressive cuts in call plans in return for 12 month contracts, increases in line rental and some volume-related call charges

The £1 line rental increase is in line with our expectations and could trigger a round of increases by other players following Ofcom’s forthcoming statement on Openreach’s wholesale price ceilings

The price changes should help BT Retail to both defend its residential customer base and conserve ARPU. However, some further loss of residential market share looks inevitable

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has confirmed it is to follow up on Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report by launching a full consultation on the local and regional media ownership regime, with a call for "views from interested stakeholders" on the key issues for the review of the merger regime to be submitted by 28th February

Although the OFT’s announcement notes the “pressures” on local and regional media, the evidence points to a local media sector in steep decline, a trend which the UK’s recession will only exacerbate

Local media will need to consolidate further in the near future if jobs and the supply of local media to communities are to be preserved in a period of declining revenues, and the merger regime (which applies to all UK specific mergers) is a barrier to this consolidation and places a disproportionate burden on local media

Recent ABC declines in consumer magazines are not indicative of the accelerated declines experienced in the past 12 weeks

All print media is engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of falling consumption, collapsing advertising, and some rising costs

Print advertising will fall by as much as 30% for some print sectors in 2009, pushing previously profitable businesses to the edge

As announced in the January trading update, BT’s Q3 results were hit by poor cost control at Global Services and the identification of some ‘toxic’ contracts. Performance elsewhere continued to be reasonable but helped by a spike at Openreach and non-core business

With a further ‘one-off’ charge against GS EBITDA in Q4 a virtual certainty, we continue to expect problems at Global Services to combine with recessionary pressures and stalling broadband growth to constrain performance well into 2010

A large pension deficit at the actuarial valuation in May looks inevitable. The Digital Britain initiative could pave the way for legitimate government and regulatory support

Ofcom has come up with a new 900MHz spectrum refarming/redistribution proposal, in which only 5MHz of spectrum is taken from Vodafone and O2, as opposed to the 15MHz it previously proposed

We still think that disrupting the voice and text services of existing customers in order to extend the availability of little-used 3G data services makes little sense, and that rearranging a small amount of intensively used spectrum when a far larger amount of unused spectrum is about to become available makes even less sense

Should Vodafone and O2 continue to oppose having their spectrum taken away, as appears likely, the delays to new spectrum auctions are likely to continue