Total TV advertising expenditure is expected to fall between 4% and 7% in 2006. ITV1 will suffer most, with a projected fall in NAR of around 13-14%, but the rest of the TV industry is also starting to feel the pain

The prospect of a merger between Scottish Media Group (SMG) and UTV (formerly Ulster Television) provides exactly the positive news the commercial radio sector needs at this time. The merger would bring together two national stations, Virgin Radio and TalkSport, under the same ownership, creating opportunities to increase these stations’ audiences, grow their revenue yields, and improve profitability whilst, at the same time, reducing operational costs by combining their management and sales functions.

The UK continues to be the largest and fastest growing national digital TV (DTV) market in Europe. We now expect 75% of UK TV homes to be equipped with digital reception by the end of 2006, rising to over 85% by the commencement of digital switchover in autumn 2008.

We have argued that mobile operators offering free broadband makes little sense from an economic perspective, and it now appears that it has little draw for consumers as well (which is lucky given its very high cost)

A large number of mobile operators are launching ‘convergence’ offers in Europe (including Vodafone across all its major subsidiaries), and this poor result in the UK suggests that this will prove a needless distraction for them

The latest RAJAR radio data (Q2 2006) delivered further bad news to the commercial radio sector, whose audience share has fallen year-on-year in all but four quarters of the last eight years to the benefit of the BBC. Commercial stations’ share of listening has dropped from a peak of 51% in Q2 1998 to below 43% this year, a level last witnessed in 1993. In the intervening thirteen years, commercial radio has launched one national and 124 local analogue stations, as well as 163 digital stations, although this unprecedented growth in supply has apparently failed to stimulate any long-term gains in share.

Market leaders Orange and Free increased their DSL retail market shares, while (newly IPOed) Neuf just managed to hold its retail market share (including AOL FR), while that of smaller ISPs (as a group) declined

True to pre-launch speculation, BSkyB has entered broadband with a price-cutting bang that will have sent tremors round the rest of the industry.

AOL UK offers buyers of its internet access business the prospect of instant scale in broadband, enabling 1,000 exchanges to be unbundled on a shared LLU basis. However, it has relatively few of the telephony customers which are necessary to exploit full LLU 

Spain’s top football club FC Barcelona (Barça) has threatened to withdraw its broadcast licence from Sogecable unless it matches an offer from Mediapro that is almost double the current annual fee for the two football seasons commencing 2006/2007 

The present TV advertising slump appears due to a uniquely British combination of very rapid digital TV growth and singular advertising airtime regulations that include the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy 

The UK market for fixed line telecoms services is undergoing huge change. Local loop unbundling is increasing price erosion in both broadband and telephony. BSkyB, BT and Orange are all planning to launch video services provided over DSL. Fixed line players unable to offer more than one service over the same network infrastructure are up for sale.

The cuts are not as bad as many had feared, and the impact on service revenue for the GSM operators will be de minimus: less than 1% at worst and a probable positive impact for O2, depending on the future level of RPI inflation. The impact will be far worse for H3G and reduce growth by about 3-4% each year until 2010/2011 

ITV plc national advertising revenues (NAR) from ITV1 fell by £50 million in 2005. This was caused chiefly by a loss of more than 6% in weighted share of commercial impacts in 2004, which enables a proportionately similar reduction in 2005 ITV1 NAR under the CRR remedy. It was offset by total TV NAR growth of about 2.5% in 2005 

BT is clearly positioning its new, 21CN-based wholesale services as an economically viable alternative to both DIY and wholesale LLU 

Here are the main points of the evidence I gave on 9 May 2006 before the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media & Sport joint meeting with Trade and Industry Committee. I was questioned by the chairman, John Whittingdale MP OBE, and committee members, John Price MP and Helen Southworth MP.

Pipex’s strategy is sophisticated, but its success depends to a large extent on implementation problems at Carphone Warehouse and Tiscali