In this presentation we highlight Mediaset's star position among European FTA broadcasters, enjoying the highest share of its national advertising market (and profit margin), stable throughout digitalisation and secure for the future
Mediaset Premium, the pay-as-you-go and subscription DTT service, grew customers rapidly up to 2010, leveraging both DTT expansion and the appetite for low cost football and film programming. This hampered subscriber recruitment at satellite pay-TV operator Sky Italia, which relaunched its sales in 2010 on heavy programming in programming, set-top boxes and marketing
Sky Italia's subscriber base may be just above that of Mediaset Premium, but Sky's ARPU is 8x that of Mediaset premium, underlining the greater efficiency of the monthly subscription bundle in relation to PAYG pay-TV. Sky Italia is profitable while Mediaset Premium might just reach breakeven in 2010
Google has launched a dedicated ebooks store in the US, with support from 4,000 publishers, providing an ecommerce platform for independent book retailers
Google’s aim is not revenue from ebooks, though the market is attractive: we estimate ebooks will be 5% of the US books market in 2010 ($1bn) and could grow to perhaps half of all book sales within the next five years
Like Amazon and Apple, Google is using ebooks to support its broader strategy, driving search traffic and building an ecommerce platform. Revenue from ebooks is less important than supporting these objectives
Facebook Messaging adds email, IM and SMS to Facebook messages. Some portion of the social network’s 600+ million users will switch to Facebook for an all in one text-based communications service
Switchers to Facebook Messaging in the US will reduce the display ad revenues of traditional portals, like Yahoo! and Microsoft, which use such tools to drive traffic
Less affected is Google. Some Gmail users will switch, but Google’s core business model is selling search advertising, where it is not challenged by Facebook (yet)
European mobile revenue growth improved by 0.8ppts in Q3 to reach -0.3%, but all of this improvement and more was due to easing regulatory pressures, with underlying growth actually declining marginally
GDP growth continues to improve year-on-year, but in the current low confidence environment underlying mobile revenue growth is not (yet) responding. Smartphone sales are surging, but their net impact on revenue is hard to discern
Looking forward, the regulatory impact is likely to turn negative again for the next few quarters, so some underlying growth catch-up is required for revenue growth to stay at around zero
This report on Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland, News Corporation’s Continental Europe pay-TV assets, complements our coverage of BSkyB in the UK. We look at the market environment, including regulation and competition. The report also provides subscriber, revenue and earnings forecasts and SWOT analysis.
Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system is launching with a big bang: ten handsets, eighteen operators, and a massive marketing campaign
The OS itself is positioned firmly in between iPhone and Android in terms of ease-of-use and customisability; it is as fast as the best-in-class but no faster; and its interface is bold but will not be to everybody’s taste
A lack of apps, limited distribution, and expensive handsets will likely limit sales in the short term. Longer term, being late in the game with no truly compelling unique feature will make building a major position very challenging, but not impossible
In Q3, Google’s UK revenue increased 14% YoY to £520 million – in line with our expectations of slowing growth in H2 – our forecast for 2010 remains at £2,075 million (all figures excluding estimated hedging gains)
In its earnings call, the company shared global display and mobile revenue numbers – on an annualised basis these now represent $2.5 billion and $1 billion respectively (with some overlap) – much higher than previous estimates
We have adjusted our 2010 forecast for UK internet advertising to account for higher than expected classified growth and previously unreported spend to £3,900 million
Google has confirmed the first content partners for the US version of Google TV – including Turner, HBO and Netflix – which is expected to launch within the next 2 weeks
No new distribution partners have been announced and rumoured pricing for enabled Sony TV sets suggests that Google TV will initially be a premium product
At present, Google TV’s main selling point appears to be providing a decent web surfing experience to the TV set – in our view, better content is needed if it is to compete with Apple TV and other internet TV devices
We forecast UK online advertising to grow by 8% CAGR to £5.1 billion by 2014, representing approx. 33% of total advertising spend, overtaking press
Search is the main growth engine, which we predict will reach £3.1 billion in 2014, due to its appeal and value to advertisers as a sales and lead generation tool
Growth in spend on social media and video networks will push online display to just over £1 billion by 2014; whilst classifieds will grow to £840 million
Google’s new Google Instant displays and updates results in real time as users type in queries, shaving an estimated 2-5 seconds off the average 9 seconds taken to carry out a search
Available in the US and UK now and key European markets shortly with other territories and mobile to follow in 2011, Instant will help Google to differentiate its search engine in an increasingly competitive market
Google Instant should stabilise, if not boost, the company’s share of queries, which has fallen both in the US and globally since February, and may also enhance the value of ads on Google