Apple’s numbers have got so good they’re bad: after growing at over 50% for two years, relative revenue growth has, inevitably, slowed. The products remain very strong, and direct competitors continue to have little impact. (Apple’s mobile phone market share has never been higher, for example.) However, the premium phone market itself, which the iPhone dominates, is at a potential tipping point.

In 2003, the Competition Commission imposed the CRR remedy as a condition of the proposed merger of Carlton and Granada to allay advertiser fears that the new ITV plc would use its market power to leverage higher airtime prices on ITV1 CRR made it possible to stop the ITV1 premium from rising and yet the ITV1 premium has risen almost without a blip since 2003. This note asks why The answer it seems has less to do with the negotiating muscle of ITV Sales than with the enduring USP and relative inelasticity of demand for ITV1 airtime and demand elasticity for the rest, while CRR has become increasingly irrelevant

Last week Samsung updated its flagship Galaxy S smartphone with a solid incremental upgrade that will cement its dominance of the high-end of Android, helped by a $14.7bn marketing budget and wide distribution

Impact will be strongest on other Android OEMs: the preceding S3 was heavily outsold by the iPhone and the new model is unlikely to change this, with similar design and positioning

Samsung’s launch event found room for a tap-dancing child and a live orchestra, but Google and Android were invisible. Samsung is clearly trying to relegate Android to a commodity and make its own brand dominant

Major European mobile operators were downbeat, with mobile revenue growth in Europe still massively underperforming the US, and their (misplaced in our view) anger at the OTT players being channelled into promoting new mobile OSs to compete with both Apple and Android

Samsung is cementing its dominance, while the other branded players focus on flagship models to try to cut through the noise. Meanwhile the flood of Android from Chinese OEM/ODMs is growing, at increasingly good quality. All other mobile platforms appear increasingly marginal

Superficially the handset industry appears to be stabilising around Apple, Android, and Samsung, plus the Chinese long tail. However, Apple, Google/Moto and perhaps Amazon may well all have disruptive moves planned for this year

Highlights of 2012, which saw double digit EBITA growth for the third year running, included ITV outperformance of the advertising market, strong organic growth in ITV Studios and a large increase in Online, Pay & Interactive revenues The outlook for 2013 suggests that EBITA could see double digit growth for the fourth year running. This is due to a number of factors that may include the bonus of extra NAR as BT launches BT Sport in the summer, arguably the biggest TV media event in recent years For the longer term, two key challenges in the Broadcast & Online sector are the retention of the ITV main channel audience share in an increasingly converged digital landscape and ITV’s ability to grow its online presence and drive new revenue streams

The development of the Digital Britain infrastructure, introduction of tablets, increasing connectivity of TV sets and launch of on demand OTT services over the internet have greatly intensified interest in connected viewing and its impact on the traditional broadcast model No single source of audience measurement for viewing of long- and short- form video content across all screens yet exists, though current market data suggest that connected viewing occupies a c. 8.5% share of total viewing across all screens By 2020, we project the connected viewing share of total viewing across all screens will reach 20%, with tablets being the primary drivers of growth, in part incremental and in part substitutional to viewing to the TV set, where we expect the connected viewing share to remain under 5%

Weak Q2 commercial viewing figures fuelled stories that ITV1 NAR could be approximately £100 million lower in 2005 unless audience share rallied in H2 2004. This was due to the Contracts Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy, imposed by the Competition Commission as a condition for the merger of the Carlton and Granada sales houses to create ITV Sales, which now controls over 50% of television advertising sales.

Ofcom produced a tough and rigorous document on ITV licence fee renewals. Although the paper is dense and difficult to understand, we think it is bad news for ITV. The likely licence fee settlement is going to be higher than commentators might have expected six months ago. The prime reasons are Ofcom’s proposed move to assessing the ‘digital dividend’ on the basis of digital viewing, not households and, second, taxing the benefits of the lower costs of the merged ITV business. The first of these is the more important financially since only about 57% of ITV viewing in digital houses is of the digital ITV service.

We have long been sceptical of claims that music download stores like iTunes, combined with hardball legal tactics against pirates, would rapidly turn around the fortunes of the music industry. The wildly successful iPod has driven the growth of digital music downloads, and is expanding the population of music downloaders that pay for music - but not forced a change of heart by file sharers! Music download sales are expanding but not fast enough to balance the decline in physical formats. Globally, we project sales of music downloads of $3.5 billion by 2010, about 10% of the total music market.

Happy Birthday iTunes! It is just over a year since Apple launched iTunes and the media continues to talk up the second coming of the music industry, whose saviour appears in the form of affable Steve Jobs. iTunes sold a total of 70 million tracks online in its first year, well below its target of 100 million, but a respectable showing, especially since it spawned a small flock of competitors determined to out-sell iTunes.