Ofcom will announce at the end of June the new terms for ITV to operate the analogue portion of its broadcast licence for ITV1. According to Ofcom's own statements, it is obliged to estimate the full value of ITV’s operation of the analogue ITV1 service and then extract all this value – bar some profit and other small allowances – in the form of annual licence payments. To do so, Ofcom has announced a methodology based on what the winning broadcaster would bid in a hypothetical competitive tender. In order to estimate the licence payments, analysts must grapple with the highly complex tasks of inferring the model from Ofcom's description and establishing the inputs.

An eventual merger is possible but difficult, especially given Hutchison Whampoa’s inflated view of H3G Italia’s value, considering it worth about the same as Wind itself, which is double the size and actually makes a profit (unlike H3G Italia)

Nonetheless, this does create a possible exit should H3G Italia’s planned Q1 2006 IPO fail, with the consolidation likely to benefit all players in the Italian market. H3G UK does not enjoy such an option, and is struggling more on a stand-alone basis to boot

Vodafone Live represents an attempt to claw back some of the initiative from handset manufacturers, and to offer product and services that add to revenue. We look at the early evidence from the UK about the design of this package, its consumer appeal and the likely impact on ARPU. Vodafone is launching this new campaign with a Java-enabled camera phone from Sharp. It is putting tens of millions of pounds behind Live, apparently targeting the product at young urban males, a demographic group that has become very loyal to Nokia. The first phone is attractive and well featured, but we question whether it is of sufficiently general appeal significantly to influence overall ARPU in European markets, particularly in light of the low levels of interest we are finding in our consumer research on camera phones.

Our most recent survey of handset purchase intentions shows a dramatic increase in interest in buying a new phone among UK adults. 39% of handset owners claim an intention to purchase in the next year, compared to about 30% in the last three bi-monthly surveys.

The flow of news about ITV is going from bad to worse. But we think that the market may have misunderstood the real story behind last week's bombshell that ITV viewing has fallen by 25% in a year. This figure could have been predicted from existing data.