Google Home will compete against Amazon’s Echo in the contest to supply voice-activated home hubs to US homes

Google claims Home is better at voice-based search due to its superior capabilities; pricing is unknown, but is likely to be at par with Echo ($179)

Prime, Fire devices and media services are competitive advantages for Amazon in the US that will make it hard for Google Home to succeed there

A post-Brexit recession will cause a hyper-cyclical decline in the advertising revenues of broadcasters and publishers

The Vote Leave idea of the UK joining a free trade area for goods with the EU would sever UK access to the Single Market for services, damaging the export-reliant audiovisual group, among many other sectors of strength

Made-in-the-UK IT, software and computer consultancy services will lose eligibility for government procurement tenders once the UK is an outsider to the EU

On TV, UK public service broadcasters (PSBs) have operated within a privileged ecosystem; a guaranteed electronic programme guide (EPG) prominence placing their channels at the forefront, helping sustain their market share and spawning digital families

But technological changes within the TV set are eroding this prominence, and on devices, such structural advantages are non-existent

To confront dramatically falling mobile engagement, despite consistently excellent content, the PSBs need to collaborate and replicate their privileged linear position or they will struggle against the major SVOD players

ITV has delivered double-digit growth in adjusted EBITA for the sixth year running, marked by big increases in both TV NAR (Net Advertising Revenue) and non-TV NAR revenues, which now make up nearly 50% of the total

The outlook for 2016 is promising. We expect continuing real growth in ITV family NAR in line with the market average, and further substantial increases in both Online, Pay & Interactive and ITV Studios

The big question is how ITV can sustain all it has achieved with the international expansion of ITV Studios and use its growing scale to support growth in its Online, Pay & Interactive revenues abroad as well as in the UK

To draw in competitors to Canal+, French football Ligue 1 broadcasting rights are being tendered in 12 lots, offered in three sequential auctions (non-premium Fans matches, Premium, highlights)

ITV plc set itself the annual target of 3-5% revenue growth up to 2010, then 5% to 2012, in its strategy presentation on September 12th 2007. Within the overall business growth target, ITV set itself a further three sub-targets. Two of these, the doubling of production revenues (currently in the region of £600 million per annum) by 2012 and the fivefold increase in online revenues from about £30 million in 2007 to £150 million in 2010 raised a good few eyebrows to judge by reactions afterwards; but the third target of 38.5% adult SOCI (share of commercial impacts, or ‘eyeballs delivered to advertisers’) by 2012 has drawn almost no attention

BSkyB’s 17.9% shareholding in ITV is likely to lead to a substantial lessening of competition in the all-TV market, according to the provisional findings of the Competition Commission (CC) investigation announced on 2nd October 2007

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has confirmed receipt of a formal request from ITV plc for a review of the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy and will announce its decision whether to proceed before the year is over

On 27th July the BBC will open access to the iPlayer to UK internet users, en route to a hard launch later this summer. This PC-based application allows the user to download BBC TV content after broadcast to view on the PC for a limited time, and provides a TV-like display on the PC. Delays to the launch will mean the iPlayer enters a field already crowded by other broadcasters, including Channel 4's 4oD service, ITV's broadband portal, Sky Anytime, as well as content aggregators such as Joost and Babelgum (both currently in beta)

Canal+ targeted subscription (as opposed to subscriber) growth of 1.3 million by 2010 has a lot of stretch in view of the intense competition from free-to-air (FTA) services and in particular digital terrestrial TV