The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has confirmed receipt of a formal request from ITV plc for a review of the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy and will announce its decision whether to proceed before the year is over
The loss of Sky basic channels, strong competition and a maturing broadband market have combined to weaken Virgin Media’s top line results sufficiently to cause cash flow to decline
Virgin Media has recently upped its mobile prices both within the ‘quad-play’ and on the Virgin Mobile standard prepay product
The distribution business was slightly weak despite good like-for-like store sales, due to the lower quality ‘off-the-page’ newspaper advertisement business being successfully cut back by the mobile operators
On 27th July the BBC will open access to the iPlayer to UK internet users, en route to a hard launch later this summer. This PC-based application allows the user to download BBC TV content after broadcast to view on the PC for a limited time, and provides a TV-like display on the PC. Delays to the launch will mean the iPlayer enters a field already crowded by other broadcasters, including Channel 4's 4oD service, ITV's broadband portal, Sky Anytime, as well as content aggregators such as Joost and Babelgum (both currently in beta)
Vodafone’s European operations revenue growth dropped, but not as much as various regulatory interventions would have warranted, implying a strong operational performance
The distribution business had a strong year, marred by a longer than usual Christmas hangover in the last quarter, but the early signs for the new financial year are promising
Vodafone achieved its 2006/07 full year targets on revenue and profitability, with solid revenue growth (underlying about 2% in Europe) but dropping margins (by around 2pps in Europe)
Growth in Q1 2007 for the aggregate non-Vodafone European mobile operations was 4.2%, a slight decline from 4.7% last quarter (Vodafone reports its results next week)
The new consumer data tariffs from Vodafone and Orange in the UK continue the trend towards dramatically lower data prices for high end users, although they are cunningly structured to involve more moderate increases for low end users