Use of publisher content to train AI models is hotly contested. Unacknowledged scraping, licensing deals, and lawsuits all characterise the publisher-AI company relationship.

However, model training is not the whole story. More and more products rely on up-to-date access to content, and some are direct competitors to publisher offerings.

Publishers can’t depend on copyright to deliver them the value of their IP. They need to track which products are catching on with users for licensing deals to make sense for them, and to ensure their own products keep up with the competition.

Starlink has unveiled its plans for its next-generation satellites, boasting dramatically more capacity than was anticipated, as it aims to bring gigabit speeds to its broadband users.

This rapid growth in capacity poses the risk of a more commercially aggressive Starlink. While this will amplify its impact on the broadband market, it remains a somewhat niche consumer proposition but with additional B2B appeal.

Amazon's Kuiper is gearing up to begin launching its own satellites. While its target of introducing service later this year is likely to slip, Kuiper will bring an important peer competitor to Starlink, and will be the first time that Amazon's retail and marketing heft enters the UK connectivity market.

Very strong subscription additions in all regions (+16% YoY, to 302 million) drove Netflix's quarterly revenue over $10 billion for the first time (+16% YoY). The advertising push appears to be continuing to dampen ARPU growth, ushering in more price rises

Netflix now has a defined advertising audience that does not watch commercial television—however, for this incremental audience to materially grow, longer-term users must be manoeuvred from the ad-free tiers

Netflix's original content slate has plateaued in major countries. If budgets have to absorb the growth of live content, there will be ramifications on the output of other genres, along with levels of market demand and production costs

Poverty has a negative impact on health in many ways —such as through housing, work, food, tobacco use, healthcare and sanitary costs, relationships, and social life—while social inequality has been shown to have its own, independent impact.

One in five people in the UK live in poverty, including nearly one in three children; almost two million households experience destitution. The life expectancy gap at birth between the most and least deprived areas of England is 9.7 years for men and 7.9 for women; the gaps are larger still in Scotland.

Multibank, an anti-poverty, community-based charitable initiative—which gifts otherwise wasted essentials to those most in need—has the invaluable support of retail and media to realise its impact.

Roblox’s rapid redirection towards attracting brands and advertisers with new tools, including programmatic advertising, is a savvy and ultimately necessary strategy to position the company as a global platform for games and entertainment IP

Roblox will comfortably hit 100 million DAUs in 2025, as growth rates begin to run upwards of 25%, aided by aggressive geographic expansion. New content partnerships could accelerate it faster 

For TV and film marketers, led by Netflix, Roblox is becoming a default option for immersive experiences and games, while actively avoiding indirect support for Disney through Fortnite

Classified advertising is estimated to have grown circa 7% in the UK in 2024, and forecast to grow 4% in 2025. Specialist platforms own these marketplaces, with both consumer and industry network effects the driving force behind platform strength

Online platforms are gradually becoming vertical-specific search providers, with dominant players Rightmove and Auto Trader looking for further growth through integrations up and down their respective value chains

The properties vertical is bouncing back as buyers adjust to ‘higher for longer’ interest rates, while recruitment sees ongoing polarisation amidst ongoing uptake of employer-facing AI. Autos, insulated from interest rates, grapples with the looming sector shift of EV quotas

Consumer, passion, and specialist publishing is developing business confidence: the industry now has a strategic clarity it has not collectively enjoyed over the last 15-20 years of scattered online traffic-based tactics

Audience payments are now being directly associated with outcomes, benefits and utility—publishers are adopting a collaborative product approach rather than a genius content mindset

AI experimentation is relatively nascent, but 2025 will be a game-changing year for production efficiencies and new product development. Given the print retail and advertising trends and risks, such opportunities cannot come too soon

15 million UK adults regularly (at least once a month) accessed the Internet from home in Q3 2001, the same as in Q2 2001. This stagnation is due to mainly seasonal factors and we expect growth of the home Internet population to be renewed in the autumn and winter.

Our lower forecasts are derived from an analysis of the numbers of households and small businesses that are apparently prepared to buy ADSL at current price levels, but also driven by concerns about this particular product. Users will have to acquire new email addresses and pay for a new email service. We do not think the product will work in networked multi-PC homes or offer ISDN users a real alternative. We see tremendous confusion in the marketplace from two competing BT Broadband offerings from BT Retail and BTopenworld.

This report contains our analysis of the French TV market. France, like the UK, is a difficult market for pay-TV and, recently, for some analogue terrestrial channels as well. We look at the analogies and differences between the two countries. In both places, excess competition and declining advertising revenues are beginning to create cracks in the noble edifices of the major TV groups. As in the UK, we conclude that analogue commercial TV may be less affected by digitalisation and pay-TV than most analysts expect.

We conclude that the economics of both free and premium digital terrestrial television are so unattractive that no rational bidder would enter the race for the licence. Likely advertising revenue on free channels will barely cover the transmission costs, while pay services will be crippled by astronomical subscriber management costs and low, or negative, margins on channels provided by BSkyB.

In this note we summarise the available evidence on trends in ARPU among European mobile operators. We demonstrate the increasing trend towards stable or increasing revenue per subscriber in key markets. The end to the long downward trend in voice ARPU is clearly in sight. This new stability is derived from increasingly firm call charges and slow growth in minutes of use. Local competitive conditions may disrupt this pattern in individual countries – and we demonstrate the countervailing trend in Finland – but, overall, the pattern is clear and will probably become more so in the next few months.

More important, perhaps, the current economics look acceptable both for BT's Wholesale and Openworld divisions - this note includes some detailed financial analysis. But even at the lower price levels, we remain unconvinced whether subscriber numbers will grow as rapidly as BT predicts. (BT is now saying that ADSL subscribers will be more numerous in 2005 than unmetered customers are today!)