2014 has been a good year for total advertising, which we forecast to grow by 5.5% across the year; display advertising spend is also forecast to grow by over 6% year-on-year. This is largely thanks to a positive economic backdrop, where we have seen a significant rise in consumer expenditure over the last two years

Online advertising spend has been the biggest recipient of growing ad spend, with 20+% growth last year, this year and next. This has mostly been to the detriment of print revenues, where online classified search solutions, amongst other factors like declining circulation, have disrupted print marketplaces

Video has been the largest growth area in internet advertising as online video consumption increases. Up to now online spend has largely been accretive to TV budgets but we are starting to see some advertisers switch to online video spend. However we do not expect TV to suffer in the same way as press

ITV and Channel 4 have asked the regulatory authorities to review the case for legislation that would for the first time allow the commercial PSBs to charge carriage fees for their main free-to-air channels on the pay-TV platforms

To this end, ITV has presented a detailed analysis showing the great contribution to the US creative economy due to the introduction of Retransmission Consent Compensation for free-to-air broadcasters in the US, but without setting this against the very different market structure in the UK, where the commercial PSBs enjoy significant privileges

Any change to UK rules will require primary legislation and is not expected until after the May 2015 General Election. Should action be taken, the choice appears to lie between regulation (adding “must carry” rules) and deregulation of commercial PSB privileges, where the end result might not be what the PSBs wished

The commercial non-PSB sector saw strong growth in share of total TV viewing of close to 40% as the multichannel TV homes universe doubled in the 10 years between the launch of Freeview in October 2002 and completion of digital switchover in October 2012, and even higher 50% growth in SOCI (share of commercial impact) thanks to the higher commercial airtime quotas of the non-main PSB channels

Even during the growth years, non-PSB channels that were present in 2003 felt a squeeze on viewing share and suffered losses as result of numerous channel launches that added to the long tail (Squeeze 1), and strong growth in the PSB families (Squeeze 2), which saw the total PSB share among the Top 25 channels in multichannel TV homes rise from less than 80% to over 90% between January 2003 and January 2014

Today, both the PSB and non- PSB commercial channel groups face the challenge of internet connectivity and increasing population of portable screens (Squeeze 3), and they are experiencing similar rates of decline. Yet, even if overall trends look the same, non-PSB viewing trends show significant variation by channel group and genre, to be explored further in Part 2

Northern & Shell has concluded the sale of the Channel 5 Group for the price of £450 million, a little over midway between the £103 million spent on acquiring Channel 5 from RTL in 2010 and the quoted target price of £700 million at the beginning of the year

Channel 5’s fourth place in the strong and buoyant UK advertising market, its PSB privileges and current audience and operating performance make it a rare and attractive opportunity for US groups like Viacom seeking to expand their international footprint

Among the challenges facing Viacom are the integration of the free-to-air Channel 5 Group reaching a broad audience with its own largely pay-TV channels aimed at the younger age groups. In the process, we expect Viacom to deepen its ties with Sky, including advertising sales, where further consolidation appears likely

The French Professional Football League (LFP) is to auction its 2016-20 broadcasting rights next month, one year earlier than expected. The anticipated auction (and short notice) increases pressure on rival LFP broadcasters – a failure to renew their existing rights deals would unsettle their position for over two years

Due to uncertainty over the future ownership of Canal+ and the political background of Al Jazeera’s beIN Sports we believe that both would prefer to maintain the status quo: the top two weekly games on Canal+ and the other eight on beIN Sports

The LFP rights are precisely packaged to prevent this, and to force the two to compete at least for one lot. As the market leader Canal+ has more to lose, while beIN Sports could sustain its current complementary positioning with fewer games

Non-subscribers can download this report in full - alongside all our other coverage of the BBC during the Charter Review process - from the 'BBC Charter Review' page of our site.

The Charter Review of the BBC officially opened with the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s inquiry into the Future of the BBC asking the question “What should the BBC be for and what should be the purpose of public service broadcasting?” The only obvious answer is that the BBC and public service broadcasting should be for the people of Britain, and the BBC rates highly on different measures of public and audience engagement. The BBC plays an irreplaceable role in the supply of PSB programming that UK audiences appreciate, most importantly news, where the BBC accounts for 70% of TV news time and for 22% of online news time in 2013.

2012 has been a year of two halves, with TV NAR up by 2-3% in H1, plus the feel good factor of the Diamond Jubilee and London Olympics, but down by 1-1.5% across the full year as economic conditions have worsened in H2 2013 and 2014 promise to be especially taxing times with significant downside risks due to weakness in the economy, the squeeze on consumer disposable income and beginnings of real fiscal austerity On the upside, we expect negative structural pressures, caused by increases in CI delivery and online growth, to subside and conditions to improve from 2015

The linear TV broadcast industry has kept its oligopolistic structure remarkably intact over the last 50 years against a background of much technological innovation and re-regulation, but now faces a new wave of innovation that promises growth of non-linear at the expense of linear True disruption can only occur by solving the device challenge of developing on a mass scale new, compelling and innovative ways to access content, but so far non-linear has achieved a very small share of total viewing while linear viewing levels are as high as ever Although non-linear viewing may become substantial, it is unlikely to result in fundamental change in the distribution value in the industry

Keen to reposition itself as a media conglomerate, Vivendi is considering merging SFR with private equity-owned Numericable and its B2B sister Completel, while reducing its stake in the new entity to below 50%.

Sizeable savings would come from migrating SFR’s fixed line subscribers in urban areas from Orange’s copper network to Numericable’s coax and FTTB, and from eliminating Completel’s LLU network and Numericable’s marketing spend.

In the short term, execution would be challenging and require sizeable capex. In the longer run, coax is a much cheaper alternative to investing in FTTH. The merger would put pressure on the other two altnets, Iliad and Bouygues, to consider consolidation scenarios.

This report contains our annual assessment and forecasts for recorded music, in the context, as always, of the implacable physical-to-digital transition in music consumption and purchase, which continues to drain the topline of the recorded music industry.

Although 2011 was another year of decline in global recorded music retail sales, these fell just 4% in 2011 compared to 10% in the previous year, on a strong year for the album in the top markets, notably Adele’s 21 album.

Globally, the CD remains the recorded music industry’s leading sales format – accounting for the majority of retail sales in 2011. Despite brisk retail sales of download to own (DTO) tracks and albums, and encouraging sales of subscriptions in 2011, sales of mobile formats (ringtones, ringbacks, tracks) have been in decline since the peak in 2008. This gives urgency to the industry’s successful transition to digital music purchase in their top markets.

Much of the consumption of recorded music is free-to-the user, whether licensed, already purchased or pirated. Live streaming is the top music behaviour, shifting from the computer to the handset via adoption of smartphones and the free apps offered on the iTunes and Google Play storefronts, amongst others. Pandora is the emblematic supplier of ‘smart radio’, and dominates this segment in the US. Smartphone adoption is also driving subscriptions to the premium mobile tier of Spotify, Rhapsody and similar services.

The centre of digital music purchase remains the download-to-own (DTO) track or album, which we estimate accounted for $4.8 billion of retail sales in 2011, roughly 10 times the level of subscription revenues. Apple has built an unassailable lead on the DTO segment, leveraging the ecosystem created for its devices.

It is well known that piracy drains the creative industries of retail sales, although the precise interaction between piracy and foregone sales is difficult to pin down. Anti-piracy regimes are being established to combat digital piracy of cultural goods, including music, but effective implementation is slow.

Our forecasts for recorded music sales do not factor in any uplift to retail sales from successful anti-piracy action. We expect retail sales of digital formats to surpass the CD by 2015, more or less stabilising the market’s topline revenues. However, sales of around $16.5 billion by that time would be just a fraction of their 2005 level of $30 billion.