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

Last week Enders Analysis interviewed David Elstein. Elstein is leading a team attempting to put in place a new management at ITV in the event that the merger is allowed by the Competition Commission. This note carries his views on the remedies likely to be imposed by the Commission and also on the scope for cost savings and improvements in business strategy at the merged group.

BT and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of BT Yahoo! Broadband for September 2003, a co-branded DSL transport/personalised home page/broadband portal service. The goal is to revitalise BTopenworld, which lost 10 percentage points in DSL market share in H1 2003. The new service will be provided to BTOW subscribers at the same price as the DSL service today, improving BTOW's value-for-money proposition and providing clear proprietary differentiation over other ISPs.

Global Services is the new name for BT's Ignite division. The structure of this important part of BT's business is complex and extremely difficult to understand. BT itself promotes the division as its 'hidden jewel', even though its financial performance in recent years has been little short of catastrophic. Investors rightly remain sceptical.

On June 1st BT is launching a radically new pricing structure for its 10m BT Together customers, dropping the distinction between local and long distance calls, and introducing a flat rate 6p for off-peak calls of up to an hour. In this report we look at the impact of these changes on BT, its customers and its competitors.

The public debate about the ITV merger has revolved around whether the maintenance of two separate sales houses is the appropriate remedy to be imposed by any Competition Commission inquiry. We argue that the real issues are more complex.

This report picks apart the evidence on why ITV1 is rapidly losing audience share. It shows that more intense competition in terrestrial homes is the key reason, not the impact of the growth of the multichannel universe. The decline of ITV1 is across all times of day and almost all demographic groups. Can ITV turn itself around in the face of this secular decline in audiences?