The promised turnaround at Canal+, the core asset of Groupe Canal+, the pay-TV division of Vivendi Universal, looks less certain due to sluggish growth of the French pay-TV market in 2003 to date and continued declines in the premium service's subscriber base. Rival platform TPS dramatically reduced the price of an entry-level package for the autumn, hoping to build market share at its expense.

Universal Music is the world’s largest music company, but has not been immune from the savage downturn in the industry. This note provides our sales projections for the company and places an approximate valuation on the business of $5bn, down significantly from last year.

This note updates on the positioning strategies of ISPs serving the DSL market in autumn 2003, as a companion to our recent reports on Cable [2003-38] and Broadbanders [2003-39]. The UK Internet market is slow moving and we expect just over 20% of Internet households to have migrated to broadband by the end of Q4 2003, up from 15% in H1 2003. A substantial share of narrowbanders will switch ISPs when migrating, making customer retention the key focus of ISP strategies.

This report covers some of the important developments in UK television viewing in the first half of 2003. It focuses on assessing the true number of Freeview homes, the encouraging progress of ITV2 and the potential impact of Sky’s PVR. We also look at the marked slowdown in the decline of ITV1 which, for the first time in recent memory, has seen yearly audience share increases in two of the last six months.

This report sets out a programme of actions to help slow the growth of music and video piracy. For the last five years the content industries and ISPs have been in a state of almost open war as a result of rampant copyright theft, largely made possible by broadband networks. Our report, by contrast, stresses the importance of cooperation between ISPs and the content industries.

This report looks at the characteristics of today’s UK broadband users in order to understand (a) likely future trends in subscriber numbers growth; and (b) how usage patterns vary between broadband and narrowband customers. We carried out a large piece of market research during the summer and the results are presented here.

The severity of the issues facing the world recorded music business is becoming clearer by the month. As a result, our concerns about the future of music business have increased over the last year. In this report, we examine the individual components of the revenues of the industry, including sales of physical formats and legitimate downloads.

The UK cable sector is now hardly covered by investment bank analysts. (It may be impossible to find anyone who isn’t tarnished by having a previous ‘Buy’ recommendation on the stocks.) But since NTL’s return from its near death experience, its share price has performed extremely well. This note takes a close look at the fundamentals for UK cable.

In this report we compare the mobile markets and operator business models in Western Europe, the US and Japan. We examine the main differences, and judge whether convergence is possible or likely.

On 21st August Hutchison Whampoa reported on the progress of its 3G investments as part of its interim report. This brief note examines this progress compared to our expectations, and reassesses the threat to the GSM operators.