After a year of speculation, Alexander Lebedev will be paid £9.25 million by Independent News & Media to take the loss-making Independent and Independent on Sunday off its hands

The new owner’s biggest challenges will be scale and positioning, reasons alone why we believe the publisher is likely to radically restructure and rethink its approach to distribution

Assuming Lebedev switches to free (at least in London), it will throw the quality newspaper market into further turmoil just as News International is preparing consumers to pay for access to The Times from June 2010

Ofcom’s consultation document on the UK wholesale local access market proposes a number of additional remedies for fixed access network operators with significant market power, but looks unlikely to have a major impact on the ability of either BT or competing players to make money from next generation access

The consultation is one element in a subtle power struggle between BT and the major competing service providers over the terms under which Openreach provides wholesale NGA products

In our view, who makes what from NGA continues to depend primarily on end user demand, which remains uncertain, and itself partly dependent on the outcome of the pay TV review and successful implementation of the ‘Canvas’ IPTV standard

Ofcom’s long awaited final statement on its pay-TV investigation will include its decision over Sky’s Picnic proposal

We expect Ofcom to greenlight Sky’s Picnic subject to ancillary conditions aimed at preventing the DTT pay-TV platform tipping towards Sky, and giving other DTT pay-TV retailers the chance to establish successful competing businesses

It is not at all certain whether Ofcom will have addressed the concerns of competing pay-TV retailers fully to their satisfaction via the soon to be announced ancillary conditions, while Sky has other routes to the DTT market besides Picnic

Google is almost certain to close its China site, Google.cn, foregoing much of the revenue and potential upside from the world’s largest internet population and fifth biggest market for internet advertising

Google.cn has performed reasonably well to date, taking about 20% of spend on paid search compared to c65% for market leader Baidu. We would expect Google’s future performance to improve but not to displace Baidu

We estimate the revenue foregone over 2010-15 from closing Google.cn to be between $2-4bn or 8.5-17% of FY2009 revenue, but it could be far higher if the Renminbi were to appreciate substantially versus the dollar

The proposal by the Conservatives to remove or to moderate Contract Rights Renewal if elected would put ministers back into the thick of competition issues

The Conservatives strongly supported the move to make the competition authorities independent of government in Enterprise Act 2002, and should this stance be reconsidered, the regulatory landscape for business would acquire a political dimension, to the detriment of UK business generally

CRR is a side issue and the Conservatives could be better advised to examine closely the marketplace for TV advertising sales in order to make it more transparent and thus work better for the industry as a whole

Vivendi’s pay-TV unit Canal+ posted flat revenues in 2009, as international growth balanced domestic erosion

Driven mainly by growth internationally, we anticipate recovery to annual revenue growth barely above 2% by 2012, with a slightly deteriorating EBITA margin

Canal+ could do better if it invests in the latest generation of set-tops and, possibly, free to air television

Virgin Media has indicated that ‘non-traditional’ modes of build-out could bring a further one million households within the cable footprint

The company has not yet revised its existing plans to reach an additional half a million homes by 2012, but an upward revision is looking increasingly likely, possibly to two million by 2017

Should VMed make such a revision, the impact on both VMed and other players would be modest

Hulu’s postponed UK launch, and the inability of SeeSaw and MSN to get carriage deals with the BBC and ITV, underscore the difficulty for internet TV aggregators of acquiring mainstream content

In-stream video advertising is nascent – we estimate it was worth just over 1% of UK TV ad spend last year – giving major channel operators/rights holders little incentive to syndicate their programming to online services

The future for ad-funded internet aggregators continues to look highly challenging, aside from YouTube, due to its audience scale and Google’s deep pockets

The News Corp management has given Sky Deutschland a full and costly revamp in 2009, leading to a steep year on year increase in negative EBITDA of around €200 million

Underlying trends of improvement in net subscriber additions, ARPU growth and churn reduction, assisted by its HD offer, suggest that Sky management will get close to, if not actually meet, its 2011 breakeven target

However, there are significant downside risks in the historically tough German pay-TV market, and robust profitable growth beyond 2012 presents a real challenge

Mobile content is moving to the centre of strategies for online
media. At MWC, the world’s biggest mobile conference, Google announced it now develops
all products ‘mobile first’ and Facebook reported a quarter of its 400m users access
the service through mobile

Three years after the iPhone 
launched, the handset industry is catching up, adding decent user interfaces
and mobile apps to colour touch screens and taking easy access to mobile content
beyond the iPhone

Beyond the self-selecting early adopter iPhone base, we found
real evidence of companies already successfully providing mobile content to much
wider segments of the population