The pandemic years boosted many businesses selling services on subscription in the UK: work-from-home gave people more time and money to widen the services they enjoyed in the home, such as gaming, entertainment and music, also boosting engagement with trusted news

The cost-of-living crisis dented the number of subscribers to OTT SVOD and news services in Q2 2022. Broadband and mobile are must-have; bundles of services (e.g. Sky’s pay-TV and broadband or mobile) are more resilient; yearly and multi-year contracts prevent churn relative to monthly contracts; and services that cater to passions (e.g. football) are always need-to-have

Subscription (or supporter) media and news services reaped the demand for trusted news through the pandemic, but now face a tough challenge to their toplines from the economic downturn—and also to transition to a sustainable business model for media audiences, while advertisers are also feeling the heat

H3G and T-Mobile have agreed to fully share their 3G networks, with their networks being roughly doubled to a combined 13,000 sites over the next two years

Iliad is getting ever closer to securing the French 4th 3G licence on terms with which it is happy, with progress slow but seemingly inevitable, and a licence award likely in H2 2008 followed by service launch in 2010

Google has announced that it will be bidding for 700MHz spectrum in the US, after the FCC adopted most of the ‘open access’ provisions for which it lobbied

European mobile revenue growth dropped again to 1.4% from 2.8% last quarter, although the roaming cuts mandated by the EU do approximately explain the drop

Vodafone’s European revenue growth has dropped again in the latest quarter, both relative to the prior quarter and its competitors, with Spain performing particularly poorly

Google has announced that, alongside other industry partners, it is to create ‘Android’, a new operating system for mobile phones which is designed to facilitate the design and use of 3rd party applications, and which is planned to be in handsets from H2 2008

H3G has launched the ‘Skypephone’, a Skype-branded phone with a free Skype VoIP service fully integrated into the handset

Aggregate mobile service revenue growth in the June quarter was 2.7%, down almost 1%, although this is mostly explicable by regulated price cuts

The distribution side was slightly weak again, but the prospects for the Christmas quarter are much better, with the iPhone exclusivity a big help even if its sales prove to be weak