National Express has travelled far enough for now British transport companies don't travel well, at least historically. Many an overseas adventure has ended in financial failure and retreat, so Phil White, chief executive of National Express, will have to forgive the City for not sharing his enthusiasm for the company's £262m acquistion of the Spanish coach operator Alsa. With sentiment in the City so depressed towards BSkyB and its strategy, now is a good time to invest Buy. This is fair, rather than cheap, but as well as the jam tomorrow of another big customer push, there is also a modest dividend, yielding about 2 per cent. The share price now values BSkyB on 17 times current year earnings, falling to 14 times in 2007.

That 19 per cent share price fall, and the drift of the shares since, reflected the initial profit hit of the new marketing push and the lower profits from the new 2 million customers who are likely to choose basic packages only. And then there is the emerging threat from BT and others who are launching television over broadband services Gulp Sounds frightening. But BSkyB is an audacious company with a sparkling track record and would be worth backing against a cable company with much to sort out from the merger and a wrong-headed move into mobile telephony. The attractions of Freeview will undoubtedly limit the number of non-digital homes that will choose Sky as the Government promotes switching to digital televison, but Sky will always have more unique content for which it can be worth paying.

As for broadband TV, BSkyB is in the process of buying Easynet, an internet service provider with a network of wires across the UK and an increasing reach into homes, enabling Sky to start offering TV-and-internet packages and keeping its options open on TV technologies for the future. It could also be hurt if cable gets its act together after the merger of NTL with Telewest and the mooted rebranding of the whole shooting match as Virgin. It has most to lose from the march of Freeview, where you might only get 57 channels with nothing on, instead of Sky's 100-odd, but which at least is free. Why might it seem impossible? Well, first, 44 per cent of UK homes already have pay-TV, and three-quarters of those are already with Sky. A task that looked either impossible, or involving impossibly high marketing costs, to the extent that BSkyB shares collapsed by 19 per cent on the day last year that the target was announced.

Now Sky has set itself the target of reaching 10 million subscribers by the end of 2010. BSkyB has just met its target of signing up 8 million customers - with the emphasis on the word "just". With less than a fortnight to go before the end of the year, and with more than one in ten existing customers leaving Sky every year at the moment, it had seemed touch and go. And the City thinks 8 million was the easy part. We'll see, but the concentration of Britain's local press into a small number of specialist operators continues apace.