Broadband market revenue for the ‘big 4’ remains in decline as recovering subscriber trends are countered by worsening ARPU.

While abating altnet pressure should eventually lead to recovery, in the short term we expect revenue growth to worsen as the seasonal effect of annual price rises bites in the June quarter.

The longer-term outlook for the altnet sector is increasingly in regulators’ hands as the CMA decides on nexfibre/Netomnia and Ofcom decides on Openreach’s new special offer discounts

On 4 June 2026, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Enders TMT Leaders Live, sponsored by AlixPartners, Adobe, Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Financial Times.

With 684 attendees and more than 50 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation, and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session Four, covering: YouTube's role in the UK creative industries; the future of sports broadcasting; and the production of House of the Dragon.
 

On 4 June 2026, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Enders TMT Leaders Live, sponsored by AlixPartners, Adobe, Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Financial Times.

With 684 attendees and more than 50 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation, and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session Three, covering: the major operators’ strategies; Openreach pricing; the Mobile Market Review and TAR; Satellite; and the potential Netomnia/nexfibre deal. 

On 4 June 2026, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Enders TMT Leaders Live, sponsored by AlixPartners, Adobe, Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Financial Times.

With 684 attendees and more than 50 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation, and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session Two, covering: Warner Bros. Discovery on scale and focus; Ofcom’s cross-sector work; ITV’s resilience; Paramount on big screen resurgence; and news media in the AI age.

On 4 June 2026, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Enders TMT Leaders Live, sponsored by AlixPartners, Adobe, Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Financial Times.

With 684 attendees and more than 50 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation, and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session One, covering: Sky's digital transformation; Google's AI strategy; the BBC's future and funding; the growth of Disney+ and Netflix in the UK and Europe; and AI and creativity from Vivendi and Havas.

Content piracy has transformed over the last twelve months into a hyper-scale cyber threat making the risk to even the one-time consumer of pirated video real and increasing. By hijacking devices throughout the home using buried malware known as residential proxies, criminal and other threat actors use pirate content services largely as a key to unlock home networks for their illicit activities.

Over 50% of piracy apps and streaming devices are estimated to contain ResProxy malware, with recent samples tracking even higher.

ResProxy is effectively a runaway cyberweapon as threat actors compete to exploit a newly revealed “democratisation” capability to take over herds of devices. Consumers face grim prospects. Cyber disasters at scale, previously only imagined in Hollywood movies, could be next.

Broadcasters accept the need to ‘meet audiences where they are’ on video-sharing and social/entertainment platforms. In practice this means full episodes where they think viewing is likely incremental, as well as multi-format ‘fandom-building’ content strategies arranged around core IP.

Thriving on platforms requires playing by platform rules. There are sophisticated strategies emerging that straddle marketing and the monetisable distribution of new formats. 

For most, this activity remains fundamentally secondary and supplemental to core offerings. There are concerns around the ability to fund the kind of premium content broadcasters and traditional studios produce via digital platforms, without entirely reconfiguring what it is they do.

BT hit its FY26 guidance with a particularly strong Q4 financial performance, which was buoyed by a number of one-offs.

Operating metrics were far from spectacular, but the company is outperforming its peers in tough markets, and Openreach’s line losses are on a clear (if potentially bumpy) downwards trend as altnet growth wanes.

Improving cashflows will still take some years to translate into rapid growth in shareholder returns given a conservative dividend policy, but the path is looking increasingly secure.

2025 was a somewhat stable year for Channel 4, with revenue generally flat (–1%, to £1,027 million), bolstered by a better advertising performance (–2%, to £922 million) than ITV, after three straight years of the reverse.

There was growth in non-advertising revenue, although it still remains a small contributor—10% of the total— but Channel 4’s production efforts are gradually taking shape while its IP acquisition strategy is moving faster. Remit delivery continued to outperform.

With new leadership in place, the future remains tricky: a volatile ad market must be navigated with the lowest cash reserves in over twenty years.

The share price reaction to Vodafone’s FY26 results appears to be centred around the outlook for European EBITDAaL in FY27, with consensus hitherto optimistically expecting a very marked turnaround in underlying performance.

Similarly, there should not have been an expectation of further buybacks, with prospective leverage towards the top of target range given recent deals.

Vodafone’s value over volume strategy cost it dearly in subscriber numbers in Q4 – a dangerous strategy in a scale industry. Less demanding guidance would give it more commercial flexibility