Year-on-year increases of 4% in total revenues, 13% in EBITA before exceptional items and positive net cash for the first time in seven years sees ITV much more strongly placed to handle future challenges post digital switchover

ITV continued to outperform the market by raising its share of TV NAR, whilst the early signs of revival in its content production business were particularly encouraging

Online still poses ITV the toughest challenges with regard to providing it with significant new revenue streams despite strong improvements in the audience metrics – an issue familiar to many

News International is to launch the Sun on Sunday on 26 February, seven months after closing the News of the World

In the intervening period, Trinity Mirror has picked up the bulk of the 55% of NoW copies that have not entirely fallen out of the market since June 2011

The £150 million revenue once generated by NoW is diminished and dispersed among rival publishers and we estimate that even a triumphant launch would likely generate half to two thirds of the income of the closed title

With the economy drifting sideways, we have set our centre case forecasts at 0-1% average annual growth in TV NAR and assigned a low probability to a repeat of the hyper-cyclical downturn of 2008/9

Comparative international data show a pervasive long term weakness in display advertising trends across the developed world, while emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe take an increasing share of global budgets

With digital switchover near completion, channel viewing shares across the main commercial groups should stabilise, but internet advertising, especially online video, will exert a negative structural downward pressure on TV NAR over the next three years at least

Rumours that News International will consider launching a newspaper to replace the News of the World have circulated for months, and probably only one event can dispel them

Trinity Mirror has picked up the bulk of the 60% of NoW copies that have not entirely fallen out of the market since June 2011, and arguably the longer any launch is delayed the harder it will be for NI to attract them back

The £150 million revenue once generated by NoW is diminished and dispersed among rival publishers and we estimate that even a triumphant launch would likely generate half to two thirds of the income of the closed title

The launch of Netflix in the UK and Ireland has ignited the debate on the threat from over-the-top video to pay-TV services from Sky, Virgin Media and BT

Unlike in the US, Netflix’s UK prospects and those of competitors such as Lovefilm, are fundamentally limited, given the availability of low priced pay-TV with strong on-demand components included for free

The impact of Netflix on the UK pay-TV industry is therefore likely to be even smaller than the (hard to discern) effect it has had in the US

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)

Using a little understood provision of the merger rules, the government has asked Ofcom to take a look at the Sky stake in ITV, just in case the OFT did not come up with the right answer the first time round. As a result of the intervention, Ofcom will decide whether the share purchase reduced the number of separately managed broadcasters in the UK. Since this is almost exactly what the OFT is already doing, it is impossible to see how Ofcom could reach a different conclusion to the OFT. In this sense, the intervention has little point