This report examines the medium-term prospects for Cable & Wireless. In 2003, analysts sensed a new dawn for C&W following the arrival of new management and the company's exit from the US.

In this report we update our regular survey of UK mobile users, with the latest survey conducted in April 2004. We look at user penetration, handset replacement rates, camera phone ownership and use, and also the market share prospects and camera phone usage for the mobile network operators.

Happy Birthday iTunes! It is just over a year since Apple launched iTunes and the media continues to talk up the second coming of the music industry, whose saviour appears in the form of affable Steve Jobs. iTunes sold a total of 70 million tracks online in its first year, well below its target of 100 million, but a respectable showing, especially since it spawned a small flock of competitors determined to out-sell iTunes.

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.