Our last report of the year 2004 covers device and network convergence – a recently resurgent growth story for media, telecommunications and consumer electronics companies. But does it represent any more of a reality, threat or opportunity than before?

France's Ligue de football professionnel (LFP) will reveal the outcome of its first assessment of bids for broadcast rights to 380 first division football events and highlights for the seasons 2005-2008 on this coming 10th of December. The 2004 auction picks up the thread of the 2002 auction, 'won' by Canal+ by offering an exclusivity premium, but whose outcome was annulled following a complaint by rival TPS. Broadcast rights, first split between Canal+ and TPS in 1999, have simply been carried over.

TV-over-DSL has been pioneered in the UK by HomeChoice and Kingston Interactive Television (KIT), but their combined customer base is only about 15,000. ISPs and telcos are considering TV as a potential extra application for the local networks they intend to build in urban areas by unbundling local loops. We define TV-over-DSL as the multicast distribution of conventional free-to-air (FTA), subscription and PPV channels over the copper wire to the TV set. Unicast on demand video (VoD) services is the subject of a forthcoming report because its characteristics and market context are entirely different.

The BSkyB change of strategy announced last August by James Murdoch has claimed its first victim according to this report: the company's own original target of 30% operating margin by FY 2006/07. That leaves the company with just two of its core targets: £400 ARPU and 8 million subscribers by the end of 2005. Meanwhile, the profit target has been replaced by the long-term growth target of 10 million Sky Digital subs by 2010, over 25% with Sky+ boxes and more than 30% with multiroom subs.

Our annual assessment of the global recorded music market highlights the key drivers of the market's development – competition for the consumer wallet from mobile telephony, video games, DVD sales and live performances, as well as piracy.

This report examines pay-TV developments in Spain where Digital+, Sogecable's DTH pay-TV service, has just celebrated its first birthday (Sogecable [2003-23]). Sogecable financial targets for 2005 are within reach.

Weak Q2 commercial viewing figures fuelled stories that ITV1 NAR could be approximately £100 million lower in 2005 unless audience share rallied in H2 2004. This was due to the Contracts Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy, imposed by the Competition Commission as a condition for the merger of the Carlton and Granada sales houses to create ITV Sales, which now controls over 50% of television advertising sales.

Ofcom produced a tough and rigorous document on ITV licence fee renewals. Although the paper is dense and difficult to understand, we think it is bad news for ITV. The likely licence fee settlement is going to be higher than commentators might have expected six months ago. The prime reasons are Ofcom’s proposed move to assessing the ‘digital dividend’ on the basis of digital viewing, not households and, second, taxing the benefits of the lower costs of the merged ITV business. The first of these is the more important financially since only about 57% of ITV viewing in digital houses is of the digital ITV service.

We have long been sceptical of claims that music download stores like iTunes, combined with hardball legal tactics against pirates, would rapidly turn around the fortunes of the music industry. The wildly successful iPod has driven the growth of digital music downloads, and is expanding the population of music downloaders that pay for music - but not forced a change of heart by file sharers! Music download sales are expanding but not fast enough to balance the decline in physical formats. Globally, we project sales of music downloads of $3.5 billion by 2010, about 10% of the total music market.

Online advertising outperformed other media in 2003 in the three biggest European markets of the UK, Germany and France, a trend which we expect to continue in 2004-06. Paid search has been the principal driver of growth in the UK market (up 70% in 2003), but interest of advertisers has cooled as steep price rises have reduced its cost effectiveness as a customer acquisition tool. Paid search is taking off in France and Germany, and will fuel growth in 2004-06.

The structure of the UK broadcasting industry will be hugely influenced by the timing of the analogue switch-off. It will particularly affect ITV, whose licence fee is set by reference to the percentage of the population able to receive digital signals.