ITV has reiterated its full-year guidance after reporting a solid first half of 2026, with strong growth in digital advertising and ITVX helping offset the expected seasonal slowdown in ITV Studios.

Group revenue rose 2% in the six months to 30 June, while adjusted EBITA was flat year-on-year. Statutory pre-tax profit increased 16% to £78 million, with adjusted earnings per share up 22%.

ITVX continued to be the standout performer within Media & Entertainment. Viewing on the streaming platform rose 27% during the first half, while digital advertising revenue increased 13%. Overall Total Advertising Revenue (TAR) was up 3%, helped by strong demand around the Men’s Football World Cup.

ITV Studios reported a 2% increase in total revenue, although adjusted EBITA fell 9% as production deliveries and high-margin licensing deals are weighted towards the second half of the year. The company expects a strong H2 schedule including The Gentlemen, Line of Duty series seven, Vigil series three, Hell’s Kitchen and Guilty Creatures.

Chief Executive Carolyn McCall said the company remained “on track to deliver our full-year guidance”, highlighting continued momentum at ITVX and confidence in ITV Studios’ delivery schedule for the remainder of the year.

ITV also confirmed plans for a £100 million share buyback alongside an unchanged interim dividend of 1.7 pence per share. The buyback represents an early return of capital ahead of the proposed sale of Media & Entertainment to Sky, announced earlier this month.

The broadcaster cautioned that macroeconomic headwinds continue to affect advertising markets. Despite a strong July driven by the World Cup, ITV expects Total Advertising Revenue to fall by around 5% in the third quarter, with year-to-date revenue remaining broadly flat by the end of September.

The proposed sale of ITV’s Media & Entertainment business to Sky remains subject to regulatory approval and is not expected to complete before the second half of 2027.

Portugal’s communications regulator ANACOM has fined Vodafone €160,000 for changing the terms of hundreds of thousands of customer contracts without providing the legally required notice.

The regulator said Vodafone introduced mandatory advertising into its automatic TV recording feature for around 449,000 subscribers without giving customers at least 30 days’ written notice or informing them of their right to cancel their contracts free of charge if they did not accept the changes.

ANACOM said the case related to rules under the previous Electronic Communications Law. Current legislation continues to require providers to notify customers of contractual changes in a clear and durable format at least one month in advance, including details of any right to terminate the agreement without penalty.

The regulator said it would continue to monitor operators’ compliance with consumer protection rules covering contract amendments.

Vodafone has appealed the decision to Portugal’s Competition, Regulation and Supervision Court.

CityFibre has secured £900 million in new equity funding to support acquisitions as it looks to consolidate the UK’s alternative broadband market.

The investment comes from existing shareholders including Goldman Sachs and Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. It follows a £1.5 billion refinancing completed last year.

The company says the funding will support mergers and acquisitions as it seeks to expand its full-fibre network beyond eight million premises and establish what it describes as the UK’s third national broadband network.

According to The Telegraph, CityFibre is targeting acquisitions of larger alternative network operators with nationwide footprints, with companies such as Hyperoptic and Community Fibre among those reportedly under consideration.

The move comes as consolidation accelerates across the UK fibre sector, with many alternative network providers facing pressure from slower customer growth, intense competition and higher financing costs.

CityFibre currently passes around 4.7 million premises and says it has more than one million live customer connections. The company recently signed Sky as a wholesale customer, adding to existing partnerships with VodafoneThree and other internet service providers.

Alongside the new investment, CityFibre is also exploring options to optimise its capital structure as it continues to invest in network expansion.

EE has become the first major UK broadband provider to launch consumer broadband services offering speeds of up to 8Gbps using Openreach’s next-generation XGS-PON full fibre network.

The new Advanced Full Fibre service is initially available in Guildford, Woking and surrounding areas following a customer trial earlier this year.

Customers can choose between download speeds of 2.3Gbps and 8Gbps, with prices starting at £54.99 per month for the 2.3Gbps service and £74.99 per month for the 8Gbps tier.

The service is delivered over Openreach’s XGS-PON fibre infrastructure, which supports symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds and significantly higher capacity than existing GPON networks.

EE says the service is designed to meet growing demand for bandwidth-intensive applications including 4K and 8K streaming, cloud gaming, remote working, content creation and connected smart home devices, with support for up to 190 simultaneously connected devices.

Luciano Oliveira, Director of Product, Home and TV at EE, said the launch marked “a major milestone” as the company became the first major UK provider to offer broadband speeds of up to 8Gbps over XGS-PON technology.

EE said availability will expand as Openreach continues its national rollout of XGS-PON infrastructure.

Orange Belgium has launched Orange Sports, a new premium TV package combining its football and sports channels into a single subscription for Orange and VOO customers.

Available from 1 August, the package includes eight channels for French-speaking customers and six for Dutch-speaking viewers, bringing together the Belgian Jupiler Pro League, Europe’s five major domestic football leagues and a range of international sports.

The new offering includes La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1, the Premier League and Bundesliga, along with competitions such as the NBA and NFL. French-speaking subscribers also gain access to ATP 500 and ATP Masters 1000 tennis tournaments, plus golf, ice hockey and boxing.

Orange Sports replaces the operator’s separate Orange Football and Orange Sport add-ons. Existing subscribers will be automatically migrated to the new package, which is priced at €25 per month from 1 October. Customers with the existing sports options, as well as new subscribers, can access the package free until 30 September as part of the launch.

The service is available through Orange TV and Orange TV Lite, allowing customers to watch both at home and on the move.

Christophe Dujardin, Chief Consumer Officer at Orange Belgium, said the new package was designed to provide “a simpler, clearer and more comprehensive” sports offering by bringing together Belgian football, Europe’s leading leagues and major international competitions under a single subscription.

The BBC is restructuring its weather service with a greater focus on digital content and local forecasting, while introducing more automated television weather bulletins and closing a small number of posts.

As part of its renewed partnership with the Met Office, the BBC will open a new weather centre at the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter and expand its existing weather hub in Salford. The changes are designed to reflect growing demand for weather information via the BBC Weather app, website and social media platforms. However, there will be significant changes in on screen presentation.

The broadcaster said local weather presenters will play a bigger role in lunchtime and weekend television forecasts, while network weather presenters will continue to deliver forecasts on programmes including BBC Breakfast, the Today programme on Radio 4 and the News at Six. The News at Ten national forecast will also continue during a trial period.

However, routine radio weather forecasts will in future be read by programme presenters and announcers. On the BBC News channel, half-hourly forecasts will continue but will use automated graphics rather than on-screen weather presenters. The same format will also be adopted for the overnight edition of Weather for the Week Ahead on BBC One, while the late-night weekday weather bulletin on BBC Two will end.

The proposals will result in a net reduction of three posts and the closure of two dedicated weather studios at Broadcasting House in London, contributing to the BBC’s wider £500 million savings programme.

Jonathan Munro, Interim CEO of BBC News, said recent heatwaves had underlined the importance of trusted weather information, while the BBC said record digital audiences during June’s hot weather demonstrated changing audience habits. During one seven-day period, BBC Weather attracted more than 23 million UK online users, its highest-ever weekly audience.

Available immediately, the package combines Romance TV, Heimatkanal and GoldStar TV in a single subscription aimed at viewers seeking romantic dramas, classic German entertainment and Schlager music programming.

The package is priced at €4.99 per month following a one-month free trial and can be cancelled on a monthly basis. It is available through the HD+ TV app for DTH satellite households and HD+ IP customers, with the initial rollout covering Samsung and Panasonic smart TVs. Support for additional TV brands will follow shortly, according to HD+.

Unlike HD+’s core television offering, Fernsehen mit Herz is delivered via IP and can also be booked independently of an HD+ subscription through the HD+ Free service.

The three-channel line-up targets a broad audience for comfort viewing. Romance TV offers romantic films, series and literary adaptations including Rosamunde Pilcher, Inga Lindström and Das Traumschiff (pictured). Heimatkanal focuses on German film classics and nostalgic television series such as the Sissi trilogy, Der Bergdoktor and Die Schwarzwaldklinik. GoldStar TV complements the package with Schlager concerts, music programmes and artist specials featuring performers including Helene Fischer, Udo Jürgens, Falco and Jürgen Drews.

The launch marks a further expansion of HD+’s portfolio of optional content packages as the platform looks to diversify beyond its traditional HD channel offering.

“With Fernsehen mit Herz, HD+ is further expanding its range of additional programme packages and offering viewers even more choice,” said Christoph Mühleib, Managing Director of HD Plus. “The package meets the demand for stories that evoke emotion, familiar settings and Schlager entertainment, all easily accessible through the HD+ TV app.”

Tim Werner, CEO of Mainstream Media, added: “We are delighted to make Fernsehen mit Herz available via HD+. This enables Romance TV, Heimatkanal and GoldStar TV to reach even more viewers who appreciate relaxing entertainment, familiar stories and feel-good television.”

The partnership strengthens Mainstream Media’s distribution across Germany. Alongside the three linear channels, the company has developed a growing range of streaming and FAST channels, including FILMGOLD, WORLD OF FREESPORTS, KultKrimi, Telenovela ZDF and, most recently, anime channel AKIBA ANIME.

The dataset is based on real-world traffic collected from paying customers using its global content delivery network (CDN) across Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa and Oceania, according to the Berlin-based company. The figures compare the performance of WebTransport-based MOQ with WebSocket delivery, measuring player connection times and end-to-end latency.

According to nanocosmos, WebTransport consistently outperformed WebSocket in both metrics across all six regions. The company reported latency improvements of between 25% and 50%, while maintaining end-to-end latency at around 500 milliseconds with fewer performance outliers.

The data was collected during May 2026 and was presented publicly for the first time at the Fraunhofer FOKUS Media Web Symposium (MWS) in Berlin in June 2026.

“This is not data we collected from ourselves, our research group, or test environments. We collect this from our customers. That makes it different,” said Luiza Sadowska, Developer Advocate at nanocosmos.

MOQ, which is being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is designed to improve the delivery of live media over the internet using the QUIC transport protocol. While the specification remains under development, nanocosmos said it has been running MOQ in commercial production since mid-2025, targeting applications where ultra-low latency is critical, including iGaming, live auctions, sports betting, financial services and interactive entertainment.

The newly released figures represent the first production-grade benchmark of MOQ based on live viewer traffic rather than laboratory testing, stresses nanocosmos. Unlike deployments that rely on third-party infrastructure, the company operates its own end-to-end streaming platform, including its CDN and browser player, enabling it to monitor and optimise MOQ performance throughout the delivery chain.

Alongside its commercial deployment, nanocosmos is working to broaden industry adoption of MOQ. Its initiatives include contributing support for the protocol to widely used production software such as OBS and expanding its nanoReady partner programme to encourage hardware and software vendors to integrate the technology.

With the publication of the dataset, nanocosmos aims to provide the industry with practical evidence of MOQ’s performance as the protocol moves towards standardisation and wider commercial adoption.

Satellite operator SES has reaffirmed its full-year financial guidance after reporting strong growth in its Networks business, while saying its Media division performed in line with expectations during the first half of 2026.

Media revenue increased 46.5% year-on-year, reflecting the inclusion of Intelsat following its acquisition, although SES indicated underlying performance remained broadly in line with expectations for the broadcast market.

The company said it secured more than €400 million in media contract renewals during the first six months of the year, underscoring what it described as the continued importance of satellite for large-scale video distribution.

“Satellite remains the most efficient and reliable platform for large-scale content distribution,” CEO Adel Al-Saleh said.

Across the group, SES signed €1.2 billion of new business and contract renewals, taking its contracted backlog to €6.4 billion. The company reiterated its expectation that 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA will remain broadly stable on a like-for-like basis.

Beyond broadcast, SES continues to shift its business towards connectivity services. Networks revenue rose sharply during the period, driven by mobility and government markets, while the company reported continued commercial momentum in aviation connectivity, adding around 200 aircraft during the first half to take its electronically steered antenna-equipped fleet to more than 600 aircraft.

SES also confirmed that the next three O3b mPOWER satellites are scheduled for launch in the third quarter, increasing the capacity and resilience of its medium Earth orbit network.

The operator said negotiations on the first phase of the European Union’s IRIS² secure satellite programme are nearing completion, while development continues on meoSphere, its next-generation MEO constellation targeted for service by 2030.

Separately, SES welcomed the US FCC’s decision on clearing additional Upper C-band spectrum, saying the programme provides a path to approximately $5.6 billion in incentive payments as spectrum is repurposed for mobile services over the coming years.

Virgin Media O2’s shareholders, Telefónica and Liberty Global, are considering a range of measures to reduce the UK operator’s £22 billion debt burden following a sharp sell-off in its bonds, according to a report in the Financial Times. 

The newspaper said the two companies are discussing options including reducing Virgin Media O2’s expected £200 million shareholder dividend this year, lowering capital expenditure and cutting jobs. The discussions follow growing investor concern over the operator’s leverage and future cash generation.

The report said prices for some of Virgin Media O2’s unsecured bonds have fallen sharply during July, reflecting increased market anxiety over the company’s financial position. Investors are also said to be assessing the impact of the planned acquisition of fibre operator Netomnia by Nexfibre, in which Liberty Global and Telefónica are investors, amid concerns over future infrastructure costs and cash flow.

Virgin Media O2 has been facing increasing competition in the UK broadband market from Openreach and a growing number of alternative fibre network providers. The company has reported continued investment in fibre expansion and mobile infrastructure while maintaining its full-year financial guidance. 

Virgin Media O2 told Broadband TV News it had nothing to add, and pointed to recent investor calls.