The injection of commercial and tech sensibility would be timely for the BBC, according to Claire Enders, founder of research firm Enders Analysis and a British media veteran.

“He is level-headed and will choose his battles wisely,” she said. “Someone new will be more respected by the board than someone they’ve been kicking around for ages.”

Enders, the media analyst, sees Brittin’s tech wealth as a good thing for the BBC. “He’s also a businessman who doesn’t need to do this for the money. He’s doing it for the public good of our country,” she said. “It’s not a job for which people are going to thank you.”

“They have a history of disrupting high-price markets with a low-cost model, but they are barking up the wrong tree if they think that the UK broadband market is one of those high-price models,” said Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis. 

Egan added that even if Digi managed to acquire some of the — various — distressed fibre assets in the UK market for free, it would “struggle to make money in this environment.” 

François Godard, analyst at Enders Analysis, noted the role of Amazon Prime Video Channels and YouTube Primetime Channels as aggregators of paid streaming services, emphasising the reach that Prime Video can offer a streaming service.

“They have a payment system,” he added.

“If you subscribe to a third-party content owner on Prime Video channels like HBO Max, its content appears through the central interface, mixed into the content rails, including genre rails.”

This mirrors the holistic view that pay-TV operators are building across third-party apps, and Godard described it as very effective for the content owners.

He observed that consumers may lose sight of where the content comes from and eventually credit the aggregating streaming service (in this case, Prime Video).

If you look at Springer’s English-language portfolio, the properties sit at very different points on the spectrum of platform dependency, noted head of publishing at Enders Analysis Abi Watson. Business Insider depends on search and social for most of its traffic, and paywalls haven’t exactly helped (though it has built a strong subscriptions foundation): when visits dropped, so did revenue. Morning Brew is a direct hit, but mostly at the top of the funnel. Politico Pro serves a tiny slice of paying professionals, though it’s extremely valuable. Combined, the English-language portfolio is ad-dependent and double-exposed — to both traffic shifts and advertising swings, stressed Watson.

Here’s what Enders Analysis said in February after 2025 earnings were released: “VMO2 ended 2025 on a slowing note, with broadband still being hit by altnets and mobile impacted by negative publicity surrounding an October pricing change [see below].

Guidance for 2026 at 3-5% declines for proforma service revenue and EBITDA looks bleak, driven by current momentum and various built-in technical factors, including wholesale payments to nexfibre.

We are not convinced that the agreed nexfibre /Netomnia deal is in any sense a panacea for VMO2’s issues, but there are other green shoots that could help the company back to growth beyond 2026.”

According to François Godard, a media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis who covers the development of football media rights agreements and subscription trends across Europe, centralisation may help address the widening financial gap between clubs competing regularly in European competitions and the rest of the domestic league.

“The discrepancy between the top club and the smaller club is exploding because of the Champions League and Europa League and Conference League,” Godard says.

“On balance, maybe Benfica will suffer a little bit, but the balance is a healthier domestic competition and eventually growth in domestic revenues and total revenues,” he says.

Francois Godard agrees arguing that centralised rights sales typically make the overall product easier for broadcasters to market and distribute.

“Investors are very nervous in the climate of international uncertainty and they may overreact to the decline in subscribers in South Africa,” notes François Godard, analyst at Enders Analysis.

“Canal+ needs to better explain what’s happening with MultiChoice; it’s a bit opaque for European investors,” adds François Godard. “Not to mention that Canal+ is the only publicly traded pay-TV company (along with Viaplay, which is tiny), so the market doesn’t have easy points of comparison.”

While it is not clear how the Telegraph deal was funded, the media analyst firm Enders said that the split with KKR had left it with “cash to burn”.

“The media business was valued at €3.5 billion, debt-free, and with reportedly single-digit billions in cash,” ­Enders added.

Döpfner took cues on publishing from his surrogate father, the late George Weidenfeld, whom he described as “the opposite of cancel culture”. On the pages of his new venture, it seems likely that he will embrace a range of voices. Abi Watson, an analyst at Enders, noted the “trophy asset multiple” paid by Axel Springer: 14.7x the Telegraph’s EBITDA in 2024 – almost exactly the same as the Nikkei multiple. “The price reflects the fact that RedBird IMI overpaid in the first place, setting a floor that subsequent bidders have had to match.”

Still, eyebrows were raised at the price tag. Abi Watson and Laura Darcey of Enders Analysis described £575 million as a “trophy-asset multiple” for The Telegraph, which reported earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £39 million last year.