Growth in advertising for TV and the largest popular newspapers has not spread to local media, with regional press suffering declines in recruitment, auto and retail in 2010 despite colossal falls the previous year

Operating profit recovery in 2010 demonstrates firm management cost control, although the largest businesses have suffered 20% decline in annual profits since 2006

Publishers have engaged in various brand extensions, yet digital and other revenues remain stubbornly low, suggesting the scale of opportunity is destined to be a fraction of that from the sector’s recent past – and that consolidation is an industry inevitability

H3G Europe improved its revenue growth and margins in 2010, albeit not by as much as its headline figures claimed. It is currently growing at 5% with EBIT at around breakeven

Given that its parent company is likely to want to keep EBIT positive, it is likely to be constrained on future investment in subscriber growth, limiting its potential going forward

The UK was particularly strong, with dramatically improved contract subscriber growth, and margins improving despite this, driven by the completion of the T-Mobile network share implementation helping margins and the smartphone revolution playing to the company’s 3G network strengths

European regulators are struggling to find the right balance between promoting the competitive impact of local loop unbundling (LLU) and encouraging investment in next generation access networks by incumbents and others

In continental Europe, regulators have tended to focus on the provision by incumbents to competing providers of access to physical infrastructure. This affords competing providers a high degree of product differentiation, but tends to be relatively uneconomic, to the detriment of unbundlers in markets where the cable operator is strong

In the UK, the regulator has tended to focus on the provision by BT Openreach of bitstream access at a price set by the market

Ofcom is proposing to design the 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum auctions to ensure that the UK mobile market remains at four players, through a complex set of rules largely designed to help H3G get the spectrum it needs to remain competitive

However, the sting in the tale is that Ofcom expects H3G to pay around £600m for this spectrum, which it may not want to do, and it is not clear what the backup plan would then be

We expect the general theme of regulators seeking to protect a fourth player to repeat across Europe and across regulatory areas, especially as the US market may consolidate towards three with AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile USA

The New York Times is shortly to switch its free desktop and app services into a part-free and part-paid metered system. We also expect the UK Times to switch from its subscription ‘Berlin wall’ to a similar system

In the UK, quality newspaper circulation is moving into freefall, as smartphone and tablet devices provide target consumers with 24/7 news coverage on the sofa and on the move

Paid apps are in the pipeline for the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail, and for some Trinity Mirror local and regional sites, as publishers enter a new era of digital innovation

European mobile revenue growth improved very slightly in Q4 2010, up by 0.1ppt in reported and 0.2ppts in underlying terms, but remained negative

While the improvement is welcome, growth remains very subdued compared to pre-recession levels, especially in Italy and Spain, which continue to lag the growth of the UK, Germany and France

The outlook for mobile revenue growth is bleak, with severe MTR cuts in Germany and the UK likely to drive growth down again over the next six months

The concept of demerging Sky News is evidently a plausible one and we consider it very unlikely that critics of the deal will have much success undermining its appropriateness as a protection of plurality

However, it is harder to judge whether the proposed implementation secures the channel’s independence as fully and clearly as it might

We outline a series of issues that the information supplied for the public consultation does not appear to deal with. We note, in particular, that the proposed undertakings seem not to block Rupert Murdoch, or members of his family, from buying the 60.9% of the shares in Sky News not to be held by News Corp

Enders Analysis co-hosted its annual conference, 'Media and Telco: 2011 and Beyond', in conjunction with OC&C and BNP Paribas, on 31 January 2011. We can now provide a transcript of the presentations by industry leaders from a wide variety of organisations.

Publishers are committing no offence by using Amazon as their agent and insisting on a high price for their e-books. Owners are entitled to set their own price and remunerate retailers with a standard percentage commission

On the other hand, retailers such as Amazon that demand publishers do not sell their e-books through other channels at lower prices may well run into legal trouble

Separately, the recent assessment of the legality of using a Greek decoder card to view Premier League football in an English pub will eventually mean that retailers and rights owners will be unable to block the purchase of virtual goods in one EU country for use in another. Publishers may move towards setting single prices for the whole of the EU

In this short presentation we show our analysis of trends in UK broadband and telephony to December 2010, based on the published results of the major service providers. We include our own estimates where reported data is incomplete. This quarter’s edition includes a look at Ofcom’s recent research into broadband speeds and its response to the Advertising Standards Authority’s review of broadband advertising.