The long drawn out merger between the two Spanish pay-TV operators will finally be consummated in the next few weeks. As we have seen elsewhere in Europe, competition in pay-TV produces little but red ink. Investors will be pleased that Sogecable and Via Digital are finally combining. We have little doubt that this merger will eventually produce a profitable and successful business. But management appears too optimistic about the likely continuing cash drains as operations are combined and costs reduced over the next two years.

It was just like the old days. Apple started an online music service, which was immediately well received. Steve Jobs proclaimed loudly that the world would never be the same. Investment banks rushed to assert that digital downloading would save the music companies. Truly gargantuan estimates were made of the potential revenue streams. This note looks at the i-Tunes phenomenon.

Part of our regular series on the UK broadband and Internet markets, this note highlights the shifting fortunes of ISPs and cable operators in competing against BT brands on the fast growing residential broadband market.

On June 1st BT is launching a radically new pricing structure for its 10m BT Together customers, dropping the distinction between local and long distance calls, and introducing a flat rate 6p for off-peak calls of up to an hour. In this report we look at the impact of these changes on BT, its customers and its competitors.

Digital Bomb lll is our third annual assessment of the global market for digital set-top boxes and associated hardware. So far, our forecasts have been accurate and we continue to see relatively slow growth in the next few years.

Last week’s decision from the Competition Appeal Tribunal was seen as a victory for Freeserve over BT. Does this mean Oftel will have to use a different approach to regulation? Does the decision herald a new era in the regulation of the telecommunications and media industries in the UK? We think not.

Perhaps inevitably, ‘3’ opened for business before it was really ready. As a result, its services are patchy and unreliable. Some of these problems will be overcome in the next few weeks. Others will be more intractable. Overall, we can see some potential in 3G style services, but ‘3’ is far from being a competitor to existing 2G offerings.

Vivendi's only agenda at this time is to effect a disposal of its non-core assets for the best price to reduce debt to manageable levels. This note casts a critical eye on prospects for sale of USA Networks (good), Universal Studios (poor) and VU Games (good), as well as the disposal and valuations for other assets such as Universal Music, Groupe Canal+ and Cegetel/SFR.

With the handsets finally available and (to some extent) working, Hutchison 3G's '3' operation has finally launched in the UK. In this report we review the commercial prospects for '3' in particular and 3G in general.

Wanadoo reached an important milestone in 2002, reporting its first (very small) positive EBITDA margin on its French Internet business, thanks to broadband-related revenue increases and lower narrowband and broadband access costs. In contrast, losses widened at Wanadoo's Internet properties outside France, in particular Freeserve in the UK and Eresmas is Spain, but these were more than fully offset by profits on the Directories segment. This note looks ahead to 2003, when Wanadoo expects to reach positive EBITDA on the Internet segment as a whole, thanks to continued improvement in France and tightly contained losses at Freeserve and Eresmas.