France Télécom’s Orange TV premium strategy presents an interesting example of diversification into low cost ‘light’ pay-TV offers by an incumbent telecoms operator. Orange Sport and Orange Cinéma Séries are offered exclusively to Orange's 2.55 million TV subscribers, and five quarters after launch, adoption is 20%. This report draws several lessons on this type of venture for other incumbent operators
This report examines Ofcom's proposal that independently funded news consortia (IFNCs) assume the provision of regional TV news, occupying the regional news time slots vacated by the Channel 3 licensees
IFNCs are to be composed of commercial news organisations (television producers, newspaper groups, radio stations or websites), and will operate as private commercial/publicly funded hybrid models of regional news gathering and provision, alongside the BBC and commercial news organisations
DCMS has invited tenders for three IFNC pilots covering Channel 3 regions in Northern England and the Borders, Scotland and Wales, to be awarded in May 2010 with operations to commence by summer 2010.
Three years into its pay-TV investigation, we expect Ofcom to impose a wholesale must-offer obligation with regulated prices on the Sky premium films and sports channels in its final statement scheduled for Q1 2010
The WMO could take effect by the middle of 2010. It appears unlikely that Sky will be granted a stay of implementation whilst its appeals against the lawfulness and substance of the WMO remedy are being heard
Assuming the WMO proceeds, its impact on the pay-TV market is likely to be small in the first three to five years, but could become significant in the long-term; the core issue throughout being the rate-card prices set by the regulator, Ofcom
This report on the French broadband market examines growth trends in 2009 and forecasts to 2012, updates our previous assessments of the commercial significance of IPTV in the triple play (a bundle of broadband, telephony and TV), and details the state of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment
Shrugging off the recession (milder and shorter than in the UK), the French broadband market is set to reach 19.6 million connections by the end of 2009, up 1.9 million on 2008 – only 12% less than the level of net adds of 2008. With 2009 better than we expected, we now anticipate a sharper slowdown in net adds in 2010, with 1.4 million net adds projected. We still expect the total to reach 22.8 million connections by 2012 (70% household penetration)
Latest fiscal Q1 2010 results show continuation of the strong subscriber and revenue growth trends, but as Sky forges ahead of its rival pay-TV operators so attention is turning to competition issues
It is still unclear whether Ofcom will succeed in introducing a wholesale ‘must offer’ remedy with regulated pricing for Sky’s premium subscription films and sports channels; a proposal that Sky vehemently contests but, if put into place during 2010, this could have a significant influence over the longer term structure of the UK pay-TV market
Results for the telecoms business continued to improve, albeit on a more modest scale than in Q4 2009, with the cost base beginning to show signs of greater stability
Just-launched Sky Songs offers a ‘new’ online music model, combining on- demand streaming with credit towards DRM-free downloads, for a single monthly payment
Sky Songs combines the best features of Spotify and iTunes, with lower average per track prices for in-bundle downloads, which will appeal to the music purchaser, and drive industry revenues provided regular use is made of the service
Sky Songs is backed by the power of Sky’s brand, serving the UK’s most entertainment-conscious clientele, with initial promotions targeting Sky’s 2.2 million broadband customers
The impending Competition Commission announcement of its provisional decision concerning the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy is expected to make little change beyond extending CRR to cover variants of ITV1, such as ITV1 +1 and ITV1 HD
Extending CRR to cover ITV1 variants should benefit ITV NAR (Net Advertising Revenue) by improving ITV1’s overall audience share, but does nothing to ease the deflationary pressures now gripping the TV advertising medium, where CRR works hand in hand with the requirement on the commercial PSB channels to sell 100% of their advertising inventories
The current goings on underline the dichotomy between competition and public broadcasting policy objectives
T-Mobile and Orange’s plan to merge their UK businesses into a JV would create the UK’s largest mobile operator by some margin, and the enormous planned synergies of £545m per annum are actually quite unaggressive given the cost overlap
This achievement would be moderated by ‘integration leakage’, i.e. increased churn caused by customers leaving who were initially attracted by an aspect of one of the operators that disappears after integration, but the net result should still be positive for the JV
The remaining UK operators will benefit both from this churn and the reduction in competitive intensity associated with five players dropping to four. While all the operators may win, UK consumers might lose, with regulatory clearance thus still far from certain
This report looks at the UK broadband and telephony market up to Q2 2009. The key trend is that the steep reduction in UK broadband net additions continued in Q2 2009, to 176,100
According to recent speculation, Sky stands to benefit materially in the short-term from the replacement of Setanta by ESPN, but could suffer from rights inflation and worse in the longer term should ESPN become really successful
ESPN’s commitment to a pure wholesale channel distribution model across all platforms and lower outlay on rights gives a real chance of building a viable business where Setanta failed
But, profits will take time to build and there is little to suggest that Sky will either materially benefit from having ESPN rather than Setanta as a customer, or that ESPN will emerge as a serious threat to Sky’s own core premium sports business in the next three to four years