The Competition Commission has completed its enquiry into Project Kangaroo and will unveil its findings tomorrow morning.Kangaroo – the joint video-on-demand service from BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 – was referred to the Competition Commission by the Office of Fair Trading in June last year, with the Commission’s inquiry delaying the launch of the… Continue reading Kangaroo report published tomorrow

The Evening Standard is testing a new distribution strategy that could see it offer free and heavily discounted copies of the 50p paper outside train and tube stations.Currently undergoing secret testing, the new strategy would see free copies distributed outside train and tube stations, upmarket restaurants and West End theatres, with vendors paid fixed hourly… Continue reading Evening Standard could offer free and discounted copies

There is no silver bullet for solving the revenue problems faced by newspapers, according to Brian Harrison, digital director at Telegraph Media Group.Speaking at an AOP event last week, Harrison argued that it is essential for the press to focus its energies on diversifying digital revenues in order to ensure survival.An important part of brand… Continue reading Diversyifing revenue streams vital for traditional media

American sports broadcaster ESPN is understood to be interested in acquiring a single package of television rights to live Premier League football matches.The Premier League has asked for bids to be in by Tuesday for the right to televise its live matches for three years from August 2010.According to reports, the games are being split… Continue reading ESPN could bid for Premier League TV rights

UBC is to sell its traffic and travel news business to US radio company Global traffic Networks for £9 million in cash. The deal was meant to be finalised last year but was not completed due to what UBC called the unfavourable economic conditions at the time. The deal is now on again, however, with… Continue reading UBC to sell commercial division

January saw the release of the IPA’s latest Bellwether survey, which found that in Q4 2008 annual marketing budgets were revised down to the greatest extent ever recorded in the report’s nine-year history. The cut was the fifth successive quarterly reduction in spend, and 2009 is set to see further cuts, said the report (see… Continue reading INSIGHTanalysis: Media Healthcheck – January 2009

The online gaming site category in the US has grown 27% during the past year to 86 million visitors in December 2008, while the total time spent playing PC-based online games jumped 42%, new research has found. According to the analysis of US usage of online game sites by comScore, Americans’ total share of internet… Continue reading Growth in US online gaming

Although mobile operators have seen average revenue per user decrease, they have sought to boost revenue via new value-added services; however, the most profitable data service is still text messaging, reports In-Stat. Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) technologies provide potentially endless revenue streams for forward thinking Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), the… Continue reading Text messaging remains most profitable mobile data service

This week’s edition of “The Inside Line” looks at the UK Quality newspaper market. Each week we will take a key media topic and ask the industry for their opinion.This week’s question:In light of the news that the Independent could be up for sale, do you think that there are too many Quality newspapers in… Continue reading The Inside Line: The UK Quality newspaper market

JCDecaux saw UK revenues fall 4.7% during 2008, although the company said that it “outperformed” its domestic advertising market. Excluding acquisitions and the impact of foreign exchange rates, the UK street furniture business enjoyed a “high single-digit” decrease in organic revenue in Q4. UK billboard business revenues were flat in the last quarter of 2008.… Continue reading JCDecaux revenues fall 4.7% in 2008