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European mobile revenue growth has declined again, from 1.4% to 0.5%, despite favourable movements in regulatory factors, which imply an underlying drop in growth of about 2 percentage points

The enclosed presentation updates our latest UK TV and display media advertising figures to reflect the dramatic downgrading of the state of the UK economy in recent weeks and days, ending talk of a shallow and short recession. Our central case assumption is of a 2% real GDP decline in 2009, led by a consumption decline of 3%, but we recognise that the UK economy has entered a long and uncertain period of adjustment, with few historical parallels, which will require constant updating of our forecasts as it evolves. On our central case, total UK advertising will be down almost 5% in 2008 to £16.8 billion, with a further decline of 12% in 2009. The declines for display advertising are sharper, and will accelerate the structural changes taking place in the UK media landscape mainly due to the shift to the internet

This presentation on the French pay-TV market covers the principal recent developments on that market and the positioning of suppliers, including Vivendi's Canal+, France Télécom's Orange, Numericable and alnets Iliad and SFR. French TV homes are rapidly switching over to 'free' multichannel TV services, but the upside for premium subscriptions is modest. To maintain positioning as the dominant premium content provider, Canal+ is both improving the user experience of its core DTH subscribers (e.g. the new Le Cube), and widening its partnerships with network operators to offer on-demand to Canal+ subscribers. Orange is one significant exception, due to the rivalry initiated by the launch of Orange TV pay services in July 2008. This rivalry was a factor in lower subscription levels for Canal+ in Q3 2008, down to 10.41 million, in addition to the ongoing lure of free, plus the economic downturn and credit crunch. The target of 11.5 million subscriptions by 2011 looks out of reach (Orange Threat to Canal+ Targets [2008-24])

As announced in the October trading update, BT’s Q2 results were hit by poor cost control at Global Services. Performance elsewhere was reasonable but was shored up at group level by a spike in contribution from non-core business

On Monday 15th December, Virgin Media (VMed) announced the launch of its 50 Mbit/s ‘XXL’ broadband service, implemented over the existing cable network using the DOCSIS3 standard. This note looks at the details of the offer and the implications for VMed, other ISPs and the residential telecoms market as a whole

This report on France kicks off a series of reports on Next Generation Access on the continent, also covering Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, and concluding with a summary. Each country report is focused on the strategic rationale for NGA, and covers the incumbent's principal competitors, the IPTV opportunity, NGA plans or achievements, and the regulatory agenda. For France, our principal conclusion is that plans for NGA respond mainly to a strategic imperative to upgrade IPTV services to HD and multiple feed, with limited direct uplift to ARPU, making these plans generally cautious, tactical and highly focused on IPTV niche markets

UK broadband net additions in Q3 2008 fell sequentially, the first time this has happened in a third quarter. Q3 net adds almost halved year-on-year to 320,000

Kangaroo, the BBC/ITV/Channel 4 VOD project, looks unlikely to see the light of day any time soon, based on the Competition Commission’s (CC) provisional findings announced on 3rd December

This is the third, after France and The Netherlands, of our reports on NGA in the continent. Deutsche Telekom’s NGA extends fibre to the cabinet, with VDSL for the last mile, to cover 25% of the country’s 37 million homes by end 2008. In our view, DTAG’s strategic rationale on NGA is to develop the IPTV proposition to better counter the competitive challenge on broadband and telephony, in core urban areas, of a resurgent cable. DTAG has already lost considerable double play market share to the altnets, and market positioning is key given the sizeable upside left in the German broadband market