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

Enders Analysis co-hosted its annual conference, in conjunction with BNP Paribas and Deloitte, in London on 4 March 2014. The event featured talks by 13 of the most influential figures in media and telecoms, and was chaired by Sir Peter Bazalgette.

This report provides edited transcripts of the talks given by seven of those speakers: James Purnell, BBC; Dido Harding, TalkTalk; Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook; John Paton, Digital First Media; Mike Darcey, News UK; Ashley Highfield, Johnston Press; Michael Comish, Tesco

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

TalkTalk enjoyed a healthy December quarter, with broadband net adds steady, TV net adds accelerating, churn falling and revenue growth accelerating to 5%

Revenue growth was boosted by a big wholesale contract win and the timing of line rental price increases, but the company did achieve a complex price restructuring with no negative ARPU impact

With churn heading down again, the company appears to have successfully weathered the BT Sport-related storm, leaving it on track to achieve its aims

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

After selling 100m iPads in 10 quarters, Apple has entered the ‘smaller, cheaper’ tablet market with the $329 (£269) iPad mini. This is well above the $200 (£159) point hit by Amazon and Google, who are selling at cost, but we expect ecosystem and design to make it a bestseller

Tablets are still in price discovery: the iPad’s US ASP has fallen from $610 to $505 since launch while Google and Amazon have found a market for smaller devices at $200. Apple is moving to extend its dominance and prevent competitors building a bridgehead in a new sub-segment

We expect further record sales of tablets at the new lower price points over Christmas, accelerating cannibalisation of the desktop web and print by tablets and apps, which take the web to the train, sofa and kitchen table

Keen to reposition itself as a media conglomerate, Vivendi is considering merging SFR with private equity-owned Numericable and its B2B sister Completel, while reducing its stake in the new entity to below 50%.

Sizeable savings would come from migrating SFR’s fixed line subscribers in urban areas from Orange’s copper network to Numericable’s coax and FTTB, and from eliminating Completel’s LLU network and Numericable’s marketing spend.

In the short term, execution would be challenging and require sizeable capex. In the longer run, coax is a much cheaper alternative to investing in FTTH. The merger would put pressure on the other two altnets, Iliad and Bouygues, to consider consolidation scenarios.