I thought that it would be worth having a general discusssion thread as a "home" for discussing the latest trends in the listed UK Media Sector. It's a fairly broad church, including Broadcasting & Entertainment (TV/Radio and now Broadband Internet), Media Agencies, Publishing and, frankly, convergence means that the overlap with the Telecoms sector is quite significant.
I will add more to this header later but here's a handy link to the August 2008 Ofcom report - http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cmr08 - which provides one of the most comprehensive pieces of media research in the UK. It's a bit old given how quickly things change in this space, but tt provides a some useful detail on the latest trends in UK media consumption from a variety of angles.
An extract from the summary of that research - http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cmr08/keypoints/:
People in the UK are spending more time using communications services than ever before – but paying less for them, according to Ofcom’s latest annual report into the UK’s £51 billion communications industry. The 365 page report shows that in 2007 we spent an average of 7 hours and 9 minutes a day using an array of communications services - up by 6 minutes from 2002. This includes watching television, surfing the net, using our mobiles, talking on a landline phone and listening to the radio. Our mobile and internet use has increased by the greatest amount. Between 2002 and 2007 the time we spent talking and texting on our mobiles doubled, up from 5 minutes to 10 minutes each day. Meanwhile, time spent on PCs and lap-tops has grown fourfold between 2002 and 2007 - from 6 minutes to 24 minutes per person every day.
I guess the interesting question for me is - how will the media industry survive the emergence of the Internet? Clearly, the business model has to evolve since the notion of "paying for content" just doesn't seem to make much sense anymore given the proliferation of content available on the Internet. Print media is clearly the most exposed and the newspapers are having a horrible time (I assume declining circulation is why the price of the Sunday Times keep spiralling upwards!) and I guess the media agencies can just evolve their model towards being an online advertising focused one.
