Late entrant Bouygues Telecom is gaining broadband market share via the quad play. Orange and SFR have now also launched quad plays, but Iliad’s mobile offers will be ready only in 2012

Iliad hopes to use its new Freebox to energise recruitment around new IPTV services in Q4 2010. SFR will also launch a new box

Led by a likely VAT hike for triple play bundled IPTV services in 2011, triple play pricing is set to rise after many years, from €30 to €35/month. FTTH upgrades in urban areas will be gaining visibility this winter

Apple has upgraded its iPod family and also iTunes, which now includes new social networking features, and revamped Apple TV, now reinvented as a streaming-only device at a fraction of its former price

We expect iPod sales volumes to continue to slide despite the update, but estimate that improved ARPU will add $600 million to Apple’s topline in FY2011. However, iPhones and Macs are the company’s key revenue drivers

The revisions to Apple TV should drive up sales, but the content offering remains weak (especially outside the US) and it is joining an already crowded playing field – its main benefit is likely to be supporting the Apple ecosystem

 

There were approximately 19 million fixed broadband lines in the UK at the end of June 2010 including those used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Year-on-year subscriber growth in Q2 increased by half a percentage point, following stabilisation in Q1, the first material since the early years of UK broadband

Looking at net additions in the quarter, Q2 saw a sequential drop of 23%, the lowest Q1 to Q2 sequential decline since 2005 . Year-on-year growth in net adds, at 51%, continued to accelerate rapidly

The ebook market has broken out of its niche. Just 3% of the US consumer books market in 2009, ebooks are on track to hit 10% this year, with the UK following close behind. With global consumer books a $120 billion industry, disruption will have dramatic consequences

Amazon has sold perhaps 3-5m Kindles in 33 months – Apple sold 3m iPads in the first three months and 3m of the iPhone 4 in the first three weeks. Amazon might look as though it is on the back foot, but as this week’s £109 Kindle shows, the game isn’t over yet

We expect the ebook market to splinter, with tablets, ereaders and smartphones all playing important parts for different genres and demographics. This makes control of the Kindle platform a key advantage for Amazon

The Apple ‘antennagate scandal’ has received massive press attention, reflecting perhaps more the extent of Apple’s smartphone incumbency than the extent of the reception issues with the iPhone 4

The problem may be greater than Apple publicly admits to, but it is less than it first appeared to be. The resulting consumer confusion will not help unit sales, but we still expect them to grow, supported by a number of feature set advances in the iPhone 4

Android handset sales are growing very rapidly, and are in a sense ‘catching up’ with the iPhone; while Android may end up dominating the mid-range, the iPhone can still enjoy an (enlarged) position at the top end, provided it can maintain a premium price justification

UK reported mobile subscriber growth has returned to stronger growth over the past few quarters as the UK economy slowly recovers

O2 is still the leading operator in terms of both its own customer loyalty and share of other operators’ customers who intend to switch, though its lead has narrowed considerably on last year

UK handset sales are likely to continue to rise, with intention to replace in the next 12 months rising from 32% in 2009 to 35% in 2010, which is albeit still some way short of the 40% pre-recession figure

Data usage overall is up –the proportion of consumers regularly browsing news and information increased to 22% from 16% last year. However, this increase was not uniform; 5ppts of this was the direct result of there being more iPhones and BlackBerrys in use, and only 1ppt was due to increased usage on any other handset

FT has put majority stakes in Orange Sport and Orange Cinéma Séries on the block, and claims to have held discussions with News Corp. We think it unlikely that an investor would be interested in entering the French pay-TV market, dominated by Vivendi’s Canal+

We believe FT could find a buyer for Orange Sport in Disney’s ESPN, which could prove viable if a cross-retailing deal is reached with Canal+. A Eurosport merger is another option. Orange Cinéma Séries could be viable under a new owner, if it widens it distribution to other platforms

Now officially on the way out of the pay-TV production business, a welcome decision in our view, Orange can focus on improving the consumer value of the basic TV offering on the triple play marketplace

 

There were approximately 18.7 million fixed broadband lines in the UK at the end of March 2010 including those used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

Year-on-year subscriber growth in Q1 increased for the first time since the early years of the industry, although the increase, from 5.7% to 5.9% was very slight. In our view it should be interpreted as a stabilisation

Looking at net additions in the quarter, Q1 saw the sequential growth drop back to a more normal level of 9% after the 54% spike in the previous quarter, but year-on-year growth, at 21%, was the first really substantial increase since Q3 2005, when market growth was coming to the end of its exponential phase

In June, Apple’s new ‘iAd’ unit will begin serving ads within iPhone apps. iAd will compete with Google’s AdMob, paralleling Google Android’s competition with the iPhone, as the two companies contend to shape how people will use the mobile internet

The iPhone’s success is underpinned by apps, which draw in both consumers and publishers in a virtuous circle, but undercut Google’s search model. With iAd, Apple seeks to make sure iPhone apps remain the most profitable place for publishers

Steve Jobs has suggested a multi-billion dollar revenue potential – the true figure could be a tenth of that, but the real value of iAd will be in defending and supporting the iPhone

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set out a vision of the social network as the hub of a personalised internet based on real identities and connections – the so called ‘Social Graph’, with Facebook providing the infrastructure

Simplified tools for apps and new social plug-ins for third party sites will increase Facebook’s influence both on and off the core platform, but raise some privacy concerns

These initiatives should help to drive Facebook’s user growth and engagement and ultimately improve monetisation, which we estimate on a per user basis is now more than half that of Microsoft’s online properties