Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) has been a failure in the UK, with BT maintaining a stranglehold on the wholesale supply of DSL connections. But in other European countries, LLU has helped provide competition to the incumbent PTT and acted as a catalyst for the development of new services, such as voice-over-broadband and TV-over-DSL, and generally brought prices down.

This in-depth report on pay-TV in France charts the course of Canal Plus and its main, but much smaller, competitor, TPS, over the period 2004-06. We anticipate pay-TV penetration will rise from 35% in 2003 to 38.7% by 2006, driven mainly by aggressive competition between TPS and Canal Plus in an improving economic environment.

This report updates our readers on the disappointing advance of online console gaming in the UK. Although the UK is the third largest video games market in the world, and was the first country in Europe to offer online gaming for Xbox and PS2, we estimate only 90,000 UK online console gamers at the end of Q1 2004 (just over 1% of 128-bit consoles sold to date).

Modest progress has been made towards consolidation in commercial radio since we last reported on the issue in mid-2003. Although the new Communications Act has liberalised the ownership rules, the potential blocking role of the Competition Commission continues to be a restraining factor in the wake of the Galaxy/Vibe ruling. That ruling found that anti-competitive outcomes could emerge even if the ownership rules were respected and it has had a chilling effect on M&A activity.

Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) is a fashionable topic and this report provides our assessment about whether the mass market potential in Europe matches the rhetoric of enthusiasts or the experience of the United States. In other words, does VoIP represent a fundamental threat to the continent's (and the UK's) incumbent telecoms operators, which still dominate the fixed telephony business? In our view, VoIP in Europe has quite a limited potential for consumers in general although business applications will expand significantly.

We expect the music publishing market to grow from $3.7 billion in 2003 to $5 billion in 2010. Performance, mobile phone ring tone and synchronisation revenues will be the most important drivers of growth in the near term, with legitimate downloads becoming significant in the medium-term (a big if given piracy, but one that we still are confident about). These will offset the expected decline in mechanical copyright revenues derived from physical sales of recorded music, as volumes continue to fall. There are however worrying signs that the standard mechanical copyright rates currently being applied (according to an expired agreement) may be reduced, which has the potential to negate the expected market growth.

A new menace hangs over the future of regional newspapers, an industry already suffering from declining display advertising and paid circulation. Starting with the NHS Electronic Recruitment Programme (ERP) launched this month, we expect the public sector will shift recruitment activity to its own sites, in the wider context of e-Government objectives to bring all services online by 2005.

Our first report on Mediaset, the Italian commercial TV empire controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, covers the company's strong results for 2003 and prospects for 2004 and 2005. The company reports on 24th March 2003.

Fastweb is an interesting altnet break-out story from Milan, Italy. Fastweb has a two-tiered network composed of a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network and the more recent DSL network based on fully unbundled Telecom Italia lines. Taking advantage of Italy's relatively low prices for unbundled local loops, Fastweb is among the leading unbundlers in Europe, with Free based in France (Iliad [2004-02]). Fastweb anticipates passing 6 million households (25% of the total) by 2006 and 10 million by 2010.

Although the prospect of a successful Comcast bid for Disney has receded almost completely, we expect it to come back. The strategic imperative for Comcast to integrate with a leading content producer remains acute. It confronts a reinvigorated and very aggressive competitor in DirecTV. Satellite is rapidly draining high ARPU pay-TV subscribers from the cable companies. Increased expenditure on programming, services and marketing are the only responses possible to combat the erosion.