US music publishers have reached agreement on rolling over the mechanical royalties due on sales of digital and physical music formats for 2013-17

The expanded scope of the statute to cover ‘scan and match’ cloud locker services, such as Apple’s iTunes Match, provides incremental revenues to music publishers; the unlicensed ‘storage’ cloud locker services are not concerned

ASCAP’s agreement on US radio performance royalties will however reduce music publisher revenues

The London Olympics promise to be a major success for both the free-to-air broadcast licensees and the leading pay-TV platforms as a result of co-operative deals being forged between them

Recent distribution agreements with Sky provide the BBC and Eurosport with a massively bigger window to showcase their credentials in in-depth sports coverage and new technologies, especially 3D

For Sky, and assuming VMed in due course, there exist a number of potential indirect commercial benefits, as the message is sent out loud and clear that there is no better place to go for London Olympics free-to-air coverage than the pay-TV platforms

Mobile operators, services and handset makers are diverging – they all come to the MWC but have increasingly little to say to each other as their businesses move in very different directions

In the context of -5% European mobile revenue growth, the MNOs at the MWC were a sober bunch, focusing on industrial services, defensive moves around messaging, and a (not unreasonable) plea to regulators for some relief

As competition in Android intensifies between hundreds of black plastic rectangles, the picture for OEMs looks tough but Google’s failure to make Android work well for developers may also start to bite, leaving an opening for Nokia and Windows Phone

We forecast print media advertising will be down by about 4% in 2012, with national newspaper display roughly flat, performances we envisage will be seen as a temporary reprieve once the substantially tougher 2013 that we expect to follow is underway

Print media is not out of the structural woods, and even relatively small revenue contraction will amplify pain as the opportunities for further streamlining fixed-cost physical distribution operations are realistically diminishing

Digital is a greater challenge for paper than for screen media, as consumer and advertiser demand continues to weaken, yet publishers struggle to generate the killer service solution to stimulate scale revenue online

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