Operating profits took a dip in H1 2014 as Sky absorbed the £110 million hike in Premier League (PL) football rights, saw marketing spend rise as a result of strong product growth and invested £40 million in its connected TV services

Growth has stayed positive across the range of TV and home communications products, while the new User Interface due to launch in the next few months promises to unlock significant incremental revenues as well as underline the quality of Sky offerings in movies and entertainment

Sky has no time to lose in building on its strengths in content, service quality and customer loyalty as the next PL auction looms towards the end of calendar 2014/first half of 2015, but the strategy appears sound with strong revenue and upside potential

BT grew both its Group level and consumer retail revenue for the first time in years, and while the extent of growth was flattered by one-off factors, growth is still positive on an underlying basis, an impressive achievement indeed for a European fixed incumbent

This is mainly driven by robust pricing, declining line losses, and continuing fibre adoption, with the indirect impact of BT Sport still hard to discern, but the direct impact absorbing all of BT’s hard won cost reduction gains to leave EBITDA flat

The outlook is positive in that BT can achieve its current financial guidance even with the millstone of BT Sport costs, but the uncertain outcome of the next Premier League rights auction casts a shadow on prospects thereafter

2013 has seen yet another year of strong growth in consumer adoption of mobile devices and screens adding to the challenges facing traditional media. Press and radio have long been affected, but television is now starting to feel the heat

BT and Sky’s contest for premium pay-TV sports rights has intensified. August saw the launch of BT Sport, while BT’s acquisition of the European football rights in November was a clear statement of intent, spending half of Channel 4’s total programming budget on approx. 200 hours of content

The UK has seen buoyant advertising growth of around 4% in 2013, with similar growth expected in 2014, in the context of the strongest economic recovery in Europe

The launch of BT Sport and the acquisition of European Champions League and Europa League rights have set the scene for the fiercest of conflicts when the domestic live Premier League rights fall due for renewal by auction in 2015

The scale of BT’s ambitions when translated into spend per percentage share of total viewing across the year are staggering for a national TV industry generating circa £12 billion a year on programming spend of less than £6 billion. The current level of rights payments by BT imply a grand annual total of £100+ billion, if all other parties paid the same rate

So far, BT Sport has performed similarly to Setanta and ESPN in terms of audience share, and with little visible gains since launch in the total estimated base of about 3.5 million households taking BT Sport. However, BT has a long-term vision and 2015 promises to be a crunch year

BT’s case that the Competition Appeal Tribunal failed to address the reasons why the premium sports market works badly will finally arrive at the Court of Appeal tomorrow. We think BT’s chances of success are low, though a win would substantially enhance its competitive position in its battle against Sky BT’s complaint is that it has always wanted to retail Sky Sports channels, however Sky has always been unwilling to wholesale them, thereby resulting in no prospect of effective competition in the provision of premium sports on TV Ofcom implicitly endorsed BT’s position when it introduced the Wholesale Must Offer remedy. However, Sky took its case to the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which overturned Ofcom’s WMO remedy on the grounds of misinterpreting the evidence, only for BT to retort by taking its case to the Court of Appeal, which is to deliver a final verdict on whether BT is disadvantaged by Sky’s alleged anti-competitive behaviour

The UK residential communications sector again had a strong quarter for revenue growth, with reported growth from the top four operators at 5%, or around 4% excluding the one-off impact of extra BT Sport related revenues

Unfortunately cost growth was even stronger, with margins dropping at three of the four largest operators. The aggressive launch of BT Sport has driven up content costs, marketing costs or both for all of the operators

The main issue going forward will continue to be actual and potential disruption relating to BT Sport. Content and marketing costs have likely been set at a new higher level, with further increases possible up to and following mid-2015, when the next Premier League auction is due and BT takes over the Champions League rights

TalkTalk maintained recent momentum despite increased competition in the quarter, delivering 5k broadband net adds and 167k pay TV net adds, although increased churn required higher marketing spend to achieve this

TalkTalk restructured its pricing towards the end of the quarter, increasing certain prices, introducing a lower cost broadband option and bringing pay TV to its (now) mid-tier plan; the net impact appears as if it will be positive

TalkTalk is fairly well insulated from the ongoing BT/Sky battle, with little enthusiasm for sports content within its base, and pricing that is already very competitive, but extra marketing costs may still weigh going forward

Following its return to revenue growth, France’s sole cable operator has merged with its B2B sister Completel and was floated on the Paris Bourse on 8 November

Numericable wants to cling to the momentum behind the European cable sector – but, due to its limited scale in a mature market, it has lower growth potential than its peers

Guidance given to investors for modest revenue and profit increases is credible, but Numericable faces the strategic challenge of Orange’s fibre upgrade which, in our view, calls for a partnership with a bigger altnet

The Vivendi empire is shrinking in revenues, cash flow and also in debt: Activision Blizzard and Maroc Télécom were sold in 2013, SFR will be spun off

We expect SFR’s topline revenue decline to halt in H1 2014, ending the pain from the disruptive launch of Free Mobile in 2012. With SFR and Bouygues Telecom intending to conclude a network-sharing agreement outside urban areas by the end of 2013, SFR should have a more positive story to tell investors when it comes to the Paris stock market in late 2014

With SFR spun off, Vivendi 3.0 will own just Canal+, Universal Music Group (UMG) and GVT (telecoms operator in Brazil), three companies without visible synergies. The end point appears to be the full dissolution of the Vivendi conglomerate

BT has doubled the price of the live ECL/EEL rights to £900m in order to outbid Sky and ITV and become the sole owner from 2015/16 to 2017/18 BT can easily absorb these extra costs through cost savings in other parts of its business, but the direct revenue returns through subscription charges and advertising on BT Sport are expected to fall far below the annual rights payments of £300m BT’s Euro victory is not a game changer in itself, but eyes are now firmly fixed on the next auction in about 18 months time of live PL rights, which could prove to be an inflationary bloodbath for all market participants