The UK’s first two trials of broadcast mobile TV, run by Arqiva/O2 and BT Movio/ Virgin Mobile, reported results in the last week. 3G-based mobile TV is already available in the UK, but its one-to-one nature severely limits the number of simultaneous users; for a mass market service, a broadcast network is required.

The arrival of 21CN, possibly in 2008, will see the launch of rate adaptive ADSL2+ services (up to 18Mbit/s) which should allow around 50% of customers to receive downstream data rates of 8Mbit/s

Vodafone announced last week a new extension to its range of music services that will offer European subscribers interactive mobile radio through a collaboration with Sony NetServices

More prominent profile of media in Free's mix of broadband, telephony and IPTV to improve customer retention and attract content owners to Free's broadband distribution channel, while VoIP remains the principal driver for non-access revenues

Our presentation UK TV Trends January 2006 [2006-01]* provides our most up-to-date views on three subjects:

Egypt-based mobile operator Orascom’s investment in Hutchison Telecom creates an intriguing if convoluted link between the 3rd and 4th players in the Italian market, Wind and H3G

Freeview recorded its strongest monthly increase of 694,000 homes in December 2005 according to BARB survey estimates, with 6.393 million digital terrestrial television (DTT) homes projected for the beginning of 2006.

We have recently completed our December survey of UK mobile users, which shows increased purchase intentions for handsets in general and camera phones in particular.  We summarise the results in this note, which are good news for handset manufacturers, but more mixed for the operators.

In January the UK Competition Commission (CC) is expected to issue its report on the pricing of mobile termination rates, an issue that was referred to it by Oftel after the UK operators rejected Oftel's initial decision. In this note we speculate on the likely contents of the report, and the impact on the UK mobile industry.

This report provides our forecasts for the growth rate of digital television homes in Europe over the next three years. We split countries into four groups and predict how the numbers of households with access to digital delivery of television will change in each group. The growth in satellite delivery has slowed considerably during late 2001 and 2002. The digitalisation of cable has stalled almost everywhere. So the only major uncertainty lies in the growth of digital terrestrial homes. This year has seen the failure of two of the four existing services, but the rebirth of the UK operator, in the form of the BBC's Freeview, may herald a more successful era. First indications are that Freeview is doing well. In other countries, however, the obstacles to the growth of a free-to-air service are more significant than in the UK and we do not believe that DTT will experience rapid growth in many other countries, despite the plethora of launches planned in the next few years.

In the next few days, NTL expects to emerge from Chapter 11, relieved of $11 billion of debt. While the long negotiations over financial restructuring have been in progress, NTL management has been conducting a huge cost reduction exercise largely out of the public eye.

This note looks at the position of TPS, the satellite pay-TV venture largely owned by TF1 in France. We particularly focus on the issue of payments for football rights because sports rights have become the crucial ingredient in pay-TV success, in France and elsewhere.