The iPad is a beautiful device that offers new ways to consume and interact with content. It takes ideas that have been discussed for decades and turns them into a (fairly) practical consumer product

The iPad poses huge challenges for print publishers, since it
has the potential both to unlock the benefits of digital for them, but also to remove
the last remaining advantages of their physical products

However, the iPad costs at least $500 and is hard to see as essential
for anyone. While there is real money to be made here, it will take a long time
to match the scale that comes from 10m people buying a newspaper every day in the
UK

H3G Group organic service revenue growth was just 0.2% in Europe in 2009, with EBITDA now roughly breakeven and cashflow remaining firmly stuck in negative territory, and lower subscriber net adds driving most of the EBITDA improvement

H3G UK is outperforming the UK market, but only just, and remains loss-making. Its prospects for 2011 are good, with its network share roll-out likely to have been completed and lower termination rates likely to be implemented, and the Orange/T-Mobile merger could provide significant long term benefits, but it will still require significant investment to gain scale

H3G Australia is now a sound business after the merger with Vodafone Australia, but all of the European businesses are sub-scale, with significant further investment and/or M&A activity required to reach sustainable profitability

Mobile content is moving to the centre of strategies for online
media. At MWC, the world’s biggest mobile conference, Google announced it now develops
all products ‘mobile first’ and Facebook reported a quarter of its 400m users access
the service through mobile

Three years after the iPhone 
launched, the handset industry is catching up, adding decent user interfaces
and mobile apps to colour touch screens and taking easy access to mobile content
beyond the iPhone

Beyond the self-selecting early adopter iPhone base, we found
real evidence of companies already successfully providing mobile content to much
wider segments of the population

 

Apple’s hardware-driven strategy for music recently passed two major milestones, with 10 billion paid track downloads and 250 million iPods sold

In 2009, Apple ‘returned’ to record labels and publishers roughly $1.9 billion, while generating gross profits in the region of $3.2 billion from the sale of iPods and music

Of wider significance to Apple is the music strategy’s contribution to building a mass market brand and expanding its customer base, helping to drive adoption of their computers and, more recently, the iPhone

Large parts of print media face existential problems from the structural decline of consumption and core advertising businesses, and the growth of an internet model of free content and large-scale disaggregation

Employment trends in US media underline the depth of the decline in sales of print media (no similar data is available for the UK), across newspapers, periodicals and books

Publishers are being forced to search for business models that align with new patterns of consumer behaviour –and which make money

This note discusses the likely obstacles to a successful launch of H3G UK, the most aggressive 3G new entrant in Europe. Our main points:

What does this mean for the media industry? Does the increasing power of media buyers mean further downward pressure on rate cards? We suspect that many of the effects have already been felt, particularly in the European and US TV businesses. In fact, we see a different issue emerging: the explosion in advertising inventory in the last few years, which has resulted in a worldwide glut. This has coincided with what we think may be a permanent reduction in the absolute number of advertisers. As a result, media buyers will continue to obtain better terms, whether in buying as part of a large group or not, but media price deflation may be a feature of the industry for many years to come.