Improving volume trends and ARPU drove Virgin Media’s cable revenue growth to improve from 3.0% to 3.6%, helped by a firm price increase implemented during the quarter

Underlying OCF growth improved more dramatically, from -1% to +6%, with synergy benefits, lower marketing costs and lower premium channel cost growth some of the main drivers

While volume growth is still modest, solid ARPU growth and cost control should allow continued strong OCF growth through the rest of the year

Amazon has entered the increasingly crowded digital entertainment TV device marketplace, one which could be strategically more important for the ecommerce giant than tech rivals Apple and Google

The frictionless integration of entertainment and ecommerce on TV represents a bigger consumer milestone than competitor services are offering, and Amazon’s brand has huge appeal, though at present it has less market traction for streaming than it does for other products

Content owners and broadcasters remain the real TV gatekeepers, with integration of TV and digital a service-level pipe dream for now, and so Amazon will likely have to accept being one of many, rather than the runaway winner as it is in books

The French Professional Football League (LFP) is to auction its 2016-20 broadcasting rights next month, one year earlier than expected. The anticipated auction (and short notice) increases pressure on rival LFP broadcasters – a failure to renew their existing rights deals would unsettle their position for over two years

Due to uncertainty over the future ownership of Canal+ and the political background of Al Jazeera’s beIN Sports we believe that both would prefer to maintain the status quo: the top two weekly games on Canal+ and the other eight on beIN Sports

The LFP rights are precisely packaged to prevent this, and to force the two to compete at least for one lot. As the market leader Canal+ has more to lose, while beIN Sports could sustain its current complementary positioning with fewer games

The UK residential communications sector maintained strong revenue growth of 5% in Q4 on a reported basis, or 4% underlying, bolstered by strong volumes and solid pricing, with recent price increase implementations supporting the latter going forward

It is still hard to see a very significant competitive impact from BT Sport, with BT’s broadband net adds up by only 20k-30k on a year earlier, but the impact on costs is very clear, with increased sports rights costs, increased marketing costs and pay TV box/device subsidies driving up the cost base of all operators

Looking forward, in the short term market volumes are likely to be suppressed by recent bad weather lengthening provisioning times, and the detailed timings of price increases will suppress ARPU growth. In the medium term the outlook is much stronger, although the prospect of increased competitive activity around the next Premier League rights auction still casts a shadow

The Court of Appeal has judged that the Competition Appeal Tribunal erred in law in its rejection of the Ofcom Wholesale Must Offer remedy for premium sports by failing to deal adequately with all of Ofcom’s competition concerns but agreed with the Competition Appeal Tribunal that Ofcom had acted within its regulatory powers Sky’s appeal against the 2010 Ofcom decision will therefore be re-heard at the Competition Appeal Tribunal and we believe the likelihood is that the Wholesale Must Offer remedy will be approved, while the jurisdiction issue may yet have some life if Sky takes its appeal to the Supreme Court The seven year old pay-TV saga is far from over as major changes have occurred in the last four years. Irrespective of the progress of the Competition Appeal Tribunal review, we think it will have little bearing on the outcome of the Premier League auction in light of the strategic objectives of Sky and BT

Virgin Media’s consumer cable revenue growth dipped down to 3% in Q4, largely driven by weaker RGU growth during the year feeding through

Subscriber net adds were however much stronger in Q4, and the company has confidently implemented firm price increases this month, backed up by another speed increase across all tiers

OCF declined by 5%, or 1% excluding one-off items, with increased sports content costs from BT and Sky weighing. However, the company remains confident of mid-single digit OCF growth in 2014, with growth improving through the year

Explosive growth in take-up of smartphones and tablets means that the effective size of the internet will increase by several multiples within the next few years. This transformation in scale comes with a major change in character and operating dynamics, creating new opportunities and revenue streams.

Twitter is unique amongst social apps: it gives new users a blank canvas in which they can (and must) create their own social network reflecting their own interests, hence building an ‘Interest Graph’, but onboarding new users remains a challenge.

Revenue at Twitter is now on a $600 million annual run-rate, scaling rapidly since the introduction of ‘native ads’, and seems set for further growth: the key question is whether it can achieve breakout user growth and mass market scale.

After a host of TV-related announcements/launches last quarter, the main feature of the last three months has been price increase announcements, with all four of the large operators announcing a significant price increase(s) to take effect between December 2012 and February 2013

High speed net adds remained strong at BT, and grew dramatically at the other DSL operators, although the latter figure remained very low in absolute terms. In time we expect strong adoption by Sky and TTG subscribers, but it may take years rather than months for consumer expectations of what is a ‘standard’ broadband speed to change

TTG reported some encouraging but not market-changing early figures for its new TV product, and BT is expected to launch a product with extra linear channels within the next few months. We continue to believe that both companies’ products will struggle to win subscribers off Sky and Virgin Media, but that they may have appeal to a modestly sized group of consumers that are not currently pay TV customers

In Q3 the ‘big four’ US mobile operators sold 22.6m phones to retail contract customers (90% of the market): 80% were smartphones and 41% were iPhones The iPhone has had close to 50% of US smartphone sales every quarter since December 2011, when Sprint began selling the iPhone, and shows no sign of weakness US iPhone sales are supported by a market pricing structure that masks the iPhone’s price premium

The linear TV broadcast industry has kept its oligopolistic structure remarkably intact over the last 50 years against a background of much technological innovation and re-regulation, but now faces a new wave of innovation that promises growth of non-linear at the expense of linear True disruption can only occur by solving the device challenge of developing on a mass scale new, compelling and innovative ways to access content, but so far non-linear has achieved a very small share of total viewing while linear viewing levels are as high as ever Although non-linear viewing may become substantial, it is unlikely to result in fundamental change in the distribution value in the industry