Analogue switch-off is of huge significance to audience share and thus advertising revenue of the existing terrestrial broadcasters (see Analogue Switch-Off [2004-26]). When switch-off occurs, ITV’s audience share will fall, thus affecting revenue from advertising, but its financial impact will be balanced to some extent by an end to ITV’s analogue licence fee payments (see ITV Licence Fees [2004-29]). Where do matters currently stand?

Carrier Pre-Selection (CPS) providers such as One.Tel and Carphone Warehouse are adding thousands of customers for fixed-line voice calls every week. BT has improved its competitive positioning in the course of 2004, but many service providers are still able to provide a discount to BT. As a result, BT lost almost 7% of UK geographic call minutes in the past year.

Our first report of 2005 deals with prospects for music download services to the PC and the mobile handset.

Our last report of the year 2004 covers device and network convergence – a recently resurgent growth story for media, telecommunications and consumer electronics companies. But does it represent any more of a reality, threat or opportunity than before?

H3G has made great strides this year, but these have mainly been in terms of reported subscribers and market perception rather than in fundamental terms. In this report we examine in depth both its global business model and the all-important funding available in order to assess the likely future for the business, and its subsequent impact on the GSM operators.

France's Ligue de football professionnel (LFP) will reveal the outcome of its first assessment of bids for broadcast rights to 380 first division football events and highlights for the seasons 2005-2008 on this coming 10th of December. The 2004 auction picks up the thread of the 2002 auction, 'won' by Canal+ by offering an exclusivity premium, but whose outcome was annulled following a complaint by rival TPS. Broadcast rights, first split between Canal+ and TPS in 1999, have simply been carried over.

The experience in France of local loop unbundling (LLU) could be indicative of LLU in the UK. About 20% of France's 6 million DSL connections will be unbundled by Q4 2004 (just 4.5% of all lines), and the LLU share of DSL connections could climb to 50% by the end of 2006.

Vodafone this week announced its formal 3G launch to great fanfare, with new handsets, services and pricing. This brief note gives our view on the launch and likely impact in Europe and Japan.

TV-over-DSL has been pioneered in the UK by HomeChoice and Kingston Interactive Television (KIT), but their combined customer base is only about 15,000. ISPs and telcos are considering TV as a potential extra application for the local networks they intend to build in urban areas by unbundling local loops. We define TV-over-DSL as the multicast distribution of conventional free-to-air (FTA), subscription and PPV channels over the copper wire to the TV set. Unicast on demand video (VoD) services is the subject of a forthcoming report because its characteristics and market context are entirely different.

The BSkyB change of strategy announced last August by James Murdoch has claimed its first victim according to this report: the company's own original target of 30% operating margin by FY 2006/07. That leaves the company with just two of its core targets: £400 ARPU and 8 million subscribers by the end of 2005. Meanwhile, the profit target has been replaced by the long-term growth target of 10 million Sky Digital subs by 2010, over 25% with Sky+ boxes and more than 30% with multiroom subs.