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In spite of the widely publicised decline in sales of recorded music, the 'music publishing' business grew at an average annual rate of over 4% between 1995 and 2000. This report assesses the prospects for this important segment of the music industry.

In the next few days, NTL expects to emerge from Chapter 11, relieved of $11 billion of debt. While the long negotiations over financial restructuring have been in progress, NTL management has been conducting a huge cost reduction exercise largely out of the public eye.

This note looks at the position of TPS, the satellite pay-TV venture largely owned by TF1 in France. We particularly focus on the issue of payments for football rights because sports rights have become the crucial ingredient in pay-TV success, in France and elsewhere.

Universal Music is an important component of Vivendi’s business. As M. Fourtou shuffles his cards, the disposal or flotation of Universal becomes more likely by the day and this report values this market-leading record company.

One response to the growth of the satellite and cable households has been for terrestrial broadcasters to launch their own digital channels. These channels are beginning to absorb significant fractions of the total programming budget and in this report we look at the implications for the parent broadcasters. We examine E4, Channel 4’s main satellite entertainment channel, showing that it is likely to remain a drain on the parent for many years to come. Rather than ‘strengthening the brand’ of terrestrial broadcasters, which is the reason normally given for diversification into satellite channels, our research shows that E4 and other services do nothing for the parent company and divert programming expenditure that would otherwise be usefully spent on the terrestrial service.

We have recently completed our December survey of UK mobile users, which shows increased purchase intentions for handsets in general and camera phones in particular.  We summarise the results in this note, which are good news for handset manufacturers, but more mixed for the operators.

In January the UK Competition Commission (CC) is expected to issue its report on the pricing of mobile termination rates, an issue that was referred to it by Oftel after the UK operators rejected Oftel's initial decision. In this note we speculate on the likely contents of the report, and the impact on the UK mobile industry.

This report provides our forecasts for the growth rate of digital television homes in Europe over the next three years. We split countries into four groups and predict how the numbers of households with access to digital delivery of television will change in each group. The growth in satellite delivery has slowed considerably during late 2001 and 2002. The digitalisation of cable has stalled almost everywhere. So the only major uncertainty lies in the growth of digital terrestrial homes. This year has seen the failure of two of the four existing services, but the rebirth of the UK operator, in the form of the BBC's Freeview, may herald a more successful era. First indications are that Freeview is doing well. In other countries, however, the obstacles to the growth of a free-to-air service are more significant than in the UK and we do not believe that DTT will experience rapid growth in many other countries, despite the plethora of launches planned in the next few years.

The public debate about the ITV merger has revolved around whether the maintenance of two separate sales houses is the appropriate remedy to be imposed by any Competition Commission inquiry. We argue that the real issues are more complex.