European mobile service revenue growth was unchanged this quarter at 0.3% growth, despite an easing of the European roaming cuts impact. This was due to intensified pricing competition in Italy and Spain, and EE’s unexpected poor performance in the UK. France and Germany were the only countries to improve their growth, but the improvement in France was largely due to a revenue-boosting VAT loophole

More-for-more price increases continued during the quarter, but their implementation is increasingly dependent on market conditions. Zero-rated streaming offers have continued to launch, but remain the exception rather than the rule.  Given the long implementation periods required for innovative new products at most operators, this may be temporary

Looking forward, overall the outlook looks finely balanced with boosts from the reduced MTR impact in Germany in Q1 2018, an easing in Spain’s retail pricing pressure and EU roaming impact annualising out by Q3 2018. This is countered by France closing its VAT loophole, steep MTR impact in Spain in Q1 2018 and continuing intense competition in Italy given Iliad’s impending launch

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will report on the public interest (PI) aspects of the Fox/Sky merger on 1 May to Secretary of State (SoS) Matt Hancock, who will announce his decision on 13 June to the Commons

Fox has offered to sell Sky News to Disney, which will prevent the Murdoch family from ever exercising control or influence and might appease opponents of the merger

The CMA is likely to advise the SoS to clear the merger, conditional on the Sky News sale to Disney, which the SoS could accept. Fox will then participate in the end-game for Sky, where Comcast is also a determined bidder

Part 2 of our Conference report provides edited transcripts of the panel discussions.

Video highlights of these sessions are available on the conference website.

This invitation-only conference was a highly informative and stimulating day, seeing over 450 senior attendees come together to hear some of the world’s leading media and communications executives describe and debate the forces shaping their businesses. The conference featured thought provoking discussion panels focused on advertising, telecoms and news themes.

After losing money for 13 years fighting Sky, Mediaset has given up. The two have agreed to wholesale channels to each other, and Sky gained the option to take over the infrastructure of terrestrial pay platform Mediaset Premium, in a deal designed to pass antitrust muster

The main strategic upside for Sky resides in eventual access to content from Italian FTA channels, allowing it to become the country’s ‘universal’ platform. Meanwhile, Mediaset may find it easier to resolve its dispute with France’s Vivendi now that the broadcaster has got rid of its main cash drain

Sky remains the only major potential buyer of the 2018-21 Serie A rights, to be sold on 21 April. However, due to the league’s unrealistic expectations and the faulty platform-based auction design, the auction may be aborted for a third time, raising the risk that heavily indebted clubs resort to short-term fixes
 

Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media & Telecoms 2018 & Beyond conference in conjunction with Deloitte, Barclays, Linklaters and Moelis & Company, in London on 8 March 2018.

With the conference taking place on International Women’s Day it was particularly poignant to see a 50/50 gender balance on the line up. Chaired once again by David Abraham and with a stellar speaker line up, this conference was a highly informative and stimulating day.  

Part 1 of our report provides edited transcripts of the keynote speaker presentations and you will find accompanying slides for some of the presentations here. Videos of the presentations are available on the conference website

Linear TV's decline continued into 2018, with an overall drop of 3% across the first 12 weeks YOY. However, overall TV set usage remained flat at 4 hours/day, as time spent on unmatched activities—which includes Netflix, Amazon and YouTube—continues to rise.

Within the ever-shrinking pie of consolidated viewing to the TV set, share of viewing (SOV) to the ten largest channels remains broadly flat. Across the whole of 2017 and the start of 2018 the best performer has been ITV (main channel).

Several big-name digital channels are showing surprising signs of recent decline, including UKTV’s Drama and Viacom’s 5USA. It is too early to tell if these declines are a blip or a trend. However, they reflect stalling growth from the long tail of digital channels in aggregate. 

Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media & Telecoms 2018 & Beyond conference in conjunction with Deloitte, Barclays, Linklaters and Moelis & Company, in London on 8 March 2018.

This report contains the slides used by Ron Mobed, Mark Evans, Serpil Timuray, Marc Allera, Geoff Austin.

There are signs of hollowing-out in the book trade: a lack of disruption at the top line obscures the fact that mid-selling breakthrough titles are becoming rarer, debuting authors is becoming more difficult and loyalty is declining

Publisher tools to overcome these trends are weakening, while self-publishing has introduced fierce competition in price, if not yet quality

To fight the tide, publishers will need to concentrate on the remaining points of differentiation, as well as preserving dedicated retail channels and changing conceptions around reader relations

At the end of January 2018, the acquisition of Time Inc. by rivals Meredith Corporation closed for $2.8bn. Time Inc. had already been in the process of selling its UK arm, which completed on March 19 to private equity fund Epiris LLP for an estimated £130m

The Time Inc. UK portfolio is a reasonably diverse one, with the following categories: Entertainment, Fashion & Beauty, Home & Design, Sport & Fitness and Specialist

Within the consumer magazine sector as a whole, oversupply remains the core issue, and we expect to see further closures of weaker titles benefiting category-leading brands

Engineering excellence and user generated content (UGC) have propelled YouTube to Facebook-level reach, with growing viewing in all demographics and on the TV-set

However, the commercial limits and PR risk of its long-tail content model have prompted a diversification effort involving subscriptions and long-form content

Becoming a major part of Google’s revenue amid fierce OTT competition would require YouTube to be more flexible in its partnerships with the AV industry, and a more aggressive go-to-market strategy