The Communications Act heralds a brave new world for commercial radio... or does it? Although newly relaxed media ownership rules vastly increase the scope for consolidation, the competition authorities have already shown they will curb excessive concentrations of advertising selling power.

BT and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of BT Yahoo! Broadband for September 2003, a co-branded DSL transport/personalised home page/broadband portal service. The goal is to revitalise BTopenworld, which lost 10 percentage points in DSL market share in H1 2003. The new service will be provided to BTOW subscribers at the same price as the DSL service today, improving BTOW's value-for-money proposition and providing clear proprietary differentiation over other ISPs.

By the 25th of July, we expect the Communications Bill will have received royal assent. The Bill, together with Oftel's new tasks as regulator pending the handover to Ofcom, represents the UK's implementation of the new EU telecoms regulatory framework. All licences issued under the existing telecoms regulatory framework will lapse and a new system of authorising providers will begin. This note covers the basics of the new regime, the existing state of play on the UK's implementation, and the main conclusion that can be drawn at this point.

Online advertising in the UK, Germany and France proved to be extremely resilient in 2002, despite a difficult advertising environment generally, victim of the soft economic conditions in Europe. Based on interviews with industry players, this report identifies the changing environment for online advertising and prospects for 2003.

Freeview is the most successful Digital Terrestrial Television service in the world. But, despite its success in attracting purchasers, it will not manage to lay the basis for the proposed analogue switch off. Not only is it attracting very small amounts of viewing to its digital channels, it is also not overcoming the resistance of large sections of the UK population to digital television.

This report examines the revenue potential of Direct interactive TV advertising (DiTV) for BSkyB and other UK channels. This advertising format exploits the technology of BSkyB's Digibox to provide the viewer with a means of directly responding to advertising campaigns featured on the television. As the gatekeeper to the Digibox, this report confirms that BSkyB will gain the most from the development of the market for DiTV, collecting up to 80% of the revenue generated.

Global Services is the new name for BT's Ignite division. The structure of this important part of BT's business is complex and extremely difficult to understand. BT itself promotes the division as its 'hidden jewel', even though its financial performance in recent years has been little short of catastrophic. Investors rightly remain sceptical.

This note reports on the results of our latest bi-monthly survey in May 2003 of handset owners and purchase intentions for the near future. Highlights include the rising share of Nokia to 57% of the UK handset market, consistent with past survey results indicating that Nokia remains the favoured brand by a wide margin, both for new entrants and for existing users upgrading to a newer model.

On June 9th '3' launched 2 new tariffs aggressively targeting the core of the GSM contract base. In this report we look at the potential impact of these on both H3G and the UK GSM operators.

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.