In the UK, carriage on Sky Q will give the new service the opportunity to prove its worth to viewers. Without integration with the UK's biggest pay-TV platform, growing scale is difficult for nascent DTC services.

Elsewhere in Europe, Discovery seeks to bundle too. Unlike the US, where the company has a single model—basic cable—in Europe it operates both free-to-air and pay channels, and it also owns Eurosport.

Ultimate success will come down to whether Discovery's "real life content" is essential and defensible. Generally there is little evidence of people taking services that are not broad, while the barriers to entry for competitors wishing to commission "real life content" are lower than other genres.

With pay-TV competition faltering, UEFA is aiming to stimulate demand for 2021-24 TV rights with early auctions, a possible relaunch of FTA broadcasts, and even, unrealistically, by considering an online service of its own

In the recently completed UK auction, facing no major threat from Sky, BT kept the rights at an almost flat price – probably missing a cost saving opportunity

In the upcoming auctions on the Continent, with former buyers such as SFR, Mediaset and Vodafone having cut back on premium sports, the major platforms’ bids will probably be unchallenged

The split of UKTV has been announced with the lifestyle channels going to Discovery, while the balance, along with the UKTV brand and VOD service, retained by the BBC, costing BBC Studios £173 million

In the same release, a new, global Discovery SVOD “powered” by BBC natural history and factual programming was announced, backed by a ten-year content partnership

The deal is a positive step for the BBC, which safeguards against flaky brand attribution internationally and the potential loss of revenues from Netflix, which is becoming more choosy when acquiring content

Governments and operators have come under increasing pressure to exclude Huawei’s 5G equipment from national networks, with justifications usually kept vague and wide-ranging rather than specific, and no evidence provided.

Given the role of Huawei’s 5G equipment in the network and the extent of existing testing and checking, realistic security risks that apply to Huawei and not to all other equipment suppliers are hard to conceive.

The risks of any ban are however very real; with Huawei one of only three global-scale telecoms equipment suppliers, and the preferred early choice for 5G radio equipment in the UK, removing this choice will massively increase costs and delay roll-outs of cutting-edge connectivity.

The combination of 5G, AI, IoT and big data were evangelised at MWC as generating massive scope for the transformation of multiple industries. 

That much is probably true, but it is the tech and consultancy companies who will likely receive the benefits, with connectivity revenue likely to be modest.

For the operators, 5G brings more capacity much needed for hungry smartphone users, and perhaps the opportunity to transform themselves into a leaner operating model.
 

Across the EU4, pay-TV is proving resilient in the face of fast growing Netflix (with Amazon trailing), confirming the catalysts of cord-cutting in the US are not present on this side of the Atlantic. Domestic SVOD has little traction so far.

France's pay-TV market seems likely to see consolidation. Meanwhile, Germany's OTT sector is ebullient, with incumbents bringing an array of new or enhanced offers to market.

Italy has been left with a sole major pay-TV platform—Sky—following Mediaset's withdrawal, while Spain's providers, by and large, are enjoying continued growth in subscriptions driven by converged bundles and discounts.

There has been no shortage of attention paid to declining TV viewing over recent years, but much of it focuses on overall viewing time rather than advertising delivery.

This is to overlook the engine driving most of the UK’s television industry. Commercial impact delivery has held up well relative to overall viewing, and is strong for certain key demographics.

Nonetheless there are generational and behavioural changes afoot which are exerting downward pressures on impacts, especially for younger audiences. An archipelago of Love Islands is needed (Stranger Things have happened).
 

Audiobooks are growing fast, driven by smartphone adoption and better supply, as well as interest from people who don’t usually buy books, such as young men

The sector is dominated by the presence of Audible, Amazon’s audiobook publisher/retailer, which has driven growth of audiobooks but put publishers under pressure. Its strategy is a lesson in Amazon’s approach to media

Audio is an opportunity to sell to new customers, but publishers must acquire and use rights responsibly, and experiment while not letting the audio tail wag the print dog

This third edition of Europe's Creative Hubs, produced on behalf of Bertelsmann, highlights the challenges of the digital age for enterprises of the creative industries of France, Germany and the UK from new consumer behaviours and the advent of new competitors and new forms of competition for users and customers from tech giants, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix. The report calls upon policymakers in Europe to ensure a level playing field for traditional media in the key areas of taxation, competition law, privacy and data protection, highlighting the interaction of these three in the market for online advertising.

Linear TV's decline continued into 2018, with an overall drop of 3% across the first 12 weeks YOY. However, overall TV set usage remained flat at 4 hours/day, as time spent on unmatched activities—which includes Netflix, Amazon and YouTube—continues to rise.

Within the ever-shrinking pie of consolidated viewing to the TV set, share of viewing (SOV) to the ten largest channels remains broadly flat. Across the whole of 2017 and the start of 2018 the best performer has been ITV (main channel).

Several big-name digital channels are showing surprising signs of recent decline, including UKTV’s Drama and Viacom’s 5USA. It is too early to tell if these declines are a blip or a trend. However, they reflect stalling growth from the long tail of digital channels in aggregate.