The elaborate mating dance in the music industry is nearing a conclusion. We look briefly at the main participants in the game and conclude that the Warner/EMI combination still looks likely to happen.

BSkyB’s quarterly results will be delivered on Friday 14th November. Prior to these new figures, this report gives our views on the attainability of BSkyB’s medium term targets.

On 24th November, the FCC hopes finally to force through mobile number portability to the US market. In this report we look at the impact that MNP has had in European markets, drawing conclusions for the potential impact in the US and Japan, and the future of MNP in Europe.

The service from '3' in the UK is one of the few examples of a 3G network in action in Europe. In this report we look at the evidence of customer experiences at 3 to determine the potential popularity of the services to a wider audience. Our sources include two studies performed by GSM operators and an NOP survey.

The promised turnaround at Canal+, the core asset of Groupe Canal+, the pay-TV division of Vivendi Universal, looks less certain due to sluggish growth of the French pay-TV market in 2003 to date and continued declines in the premium service's subscriber base. Rival platform TPS dramatically reduced the price of an entry-level package for the autumn, hoping to build market share at its expense.

Universal Music is the world’s largest music company, but has not been immune from the savage downturn in the industry. This note provides our sales projections for the company and places an approximate valuation on the business of $5bn, down significantly from last year.

This note updates on the positioning strategies of ISPs serving the DSL market in autumn 2003, as a companion to our recent reports on Cable [2003-38] and Broadbanders [2003-39]. The UK Internet market is slow moving and we expect just over 20% of Internet households to have migrated to broadband by the end of Q4 2003, up from 15% in H1 2003. A substantial share of narrowbanders will switch ISPs when migrating, making customer retention the key focus of ISP strategies.

This report covers some of the important developments in UK television viewing in the first half of 2003. It focuses on assessing the true number of Freeview homes, the encouraging progress of ITV2 and the potential impact of Sky’s PVR. We also look at the marked slowdown in the decline of ITV1 which, for the first time in recent memory, has seen yearly audience share increases in two of the last six months.

This report sets out a programme of actions to help slow the growth of music and video piracy. For the last five years the content industries and ISPs have been in a state of almost open war as a result of rampant copyright theft, largely made possible by broadband networks. Our report, by contrast, stresses the importance of cooperation between ISPs and the content industries.

This report looks at the characteristics of today’s UK broadband users in order to understand (a) likely future trends in subscriber numbers growth; and (b) how usage patterns vary between broadband and narrowband customers. We carried out a large piece of market research during the summer and the results are presented here.