ITV had a good World Cup, with the tournament driving H1 total advertising revenue up 3% YoY (£850 million), while average viewing per game was marginally better than the BBC.

Although the football provided a welcome bump, H1 viewing remained bleak (-8.5%): the broadcaster currently commands its smallest share of the decade and our 2026 forecast of a 6% drop in total engagement may turn out to be optimistic.

As expected, Studios had a steady half and will accelerate towards the end of the year with a particularly high profile pipeline.

The BBC has been doing more with less since at least 2010. Since then, licence fee income has fallen faster in real terms (28%) than its cost cutting (15%) can keep up with.

The funding base underlying the BBC must be widened, both to ensure sustainable funding levels, and to ensure the true universality of that structure in the face of changing consumption habits.

Maintaining the status quo would guarantee a meaningfully smaller BBC, with more cuts to content and services each year that goes by—to the detriment of the UK public and the wider media sector. Waiting another ten years is not an option.

VMO2 suffered a dip in revenue growth in Q2, albeit mainly due to price rise phasing issues and the Daisy integration, with EBITDA growth actually improving.

There were some concerning signs however, with mobile net adds remaining stubbornly low. Full year 2026 guidance is still achievable, but a return to growth in 2027 is challenging.

Regulatory developments have been mixed, and VMO2 will have to be careful what it wishes for as regards the future competitive structure of the sector.

With Xavier Niel becoming Vodafone’s largest shareholder, the company will be pleased to be able to demonstrate a solid set of Q1 results.

EBITDA upside is coming from Rest of World and appears largely attributable to the consolidation of Safaricom, but is nonetheless reassuring of the prospect of hard-currency growth.

We continue to have reservations about Vodafone’s value over volume strategy, with the upside of price increases often short-lived, and loss of scale a difficult place to come back from.

BT’s revenue and EBITDA growth suffered a dip in Q1, but entirely due to one-off/seasonal factors, with underlying metrics strong across the board.

Ofcom has curtailed Openreach’s ability to compete with altnets, while allowing it to compete with VMO2, a much more established and long-term competitor.

The deconsolidation of International makes the potential for a return to sustainable revenue growth much more apparent, with multiple drags (altnets, voice, price mechanics) now firmly on the wane.

Broadcaster reach has declined at different rates across the nations and regions, with Wales proving the most resilient. 

Older audiences show more consistent SVOD consumption across regions, while younger audiences drive greater regional variation. 

Drama series with a strong regional identity generate the biggest gaps between local and national performance.

As search-driven ambient discovery retreats, the inbox is becoming a top-of-funnel acquisition channel as well as a retention tool. Substack's value to publishers is infrastructure that gets content into inboxes, and email addresses into publisher databases.

The right strategy depends on the business model: paywalled publishers risk cannibalisation and use Substack as a funnel, while ad-funded publishers and broadcasters use it for parallel, personality-led brands.

Audiences attach to voices, be that an individual or a publication that talks like a real person. That attachment makes audiences portable, and that portability gets exercised when the economics justify it

In Q2, Netflix grew revenue 13% YoY (£12.6 billion), while narrowing its whole-year forecast between $51.0 and $51.4 billion. This was accompanied by an 11% lift in operating income ($4.2 billion). Advertising revenue continues to be on track to double this year to $3 billion.

Recent attention around Netflix’s engagement challenges helps to highlight that the streamer faces the same headwinds faced by all providers of long-form video, amplified by a net viewing loss from the push towards advertising.

As a counter to this, Netflix has a number of initiatives now to diversify its offering and increase engagement: some seem likely to stick and augment while others seem peripheral and value-skewing.

AI was the story of Cannes, both growing the market with new formats and cannibalising it. Not all AI increases to production are monetisable, creating disruption though the fundamentals of building engagement and resonance are unchanged.

Major platforms are still the main winners as supply ownership becomes key for differentiation. Agencies, adtechs, and commerce media are converging in function but diverging in approach as AI blurs the value chain.

Creative is at the centre of tensions between AI-led mass-market automation and human-centred bespoke connection. Platforms are defending SME audiences with end-to-end integration as agentic AI poses both opportunity and threat.

Service revenues improved sequentially but remained negative at -0.7%, with all major markets flat to improving.

Backbook price increases have become quite prolific, but there is a mixed picture on new-customer pricing and considerable ARPU pressure in most markets.

Regulatory push for better coverage in return for longer licences continues to gain momentum, with Portugal the latest to move in this direction.