The UK newspaper industry is being engulfed by a 'perfect storm'. Overall advertising has been in a cyclical downturn since mid-2005, and public sector recruitment in particular has been weak, while readers desert newspapers (even free ones) for the internet, to which they are drawing spend on classified and display advertising. We view classified advertising in print media as being in permanent decline, anticipating an overall drop from £4 billion in 2006 to £3.5 billion by 2011

Last week Google hit the headlines on the back of forecasts for its UK revenues for 2006 which we expect to reach £920 million, up 90% on 2005, cited as proof of a structural shift away from broadcast media to the internet

Ten years of fierce and implacable rivalry between Canal+ Group and TPS, the two French pay-TV operators, is expected to end in November 2006, when they close their merger deal and Canal+ France emerges. This report examines the strategic rationale for pay-TV consolidation in the French TV market, where digital terrestrial TV has recently launched and where TV-over-DSL is rapidly being deployed, as well as the potential for the currently low pay-TV margins to rise

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