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"TikTok has burned a lot of trust by dragging its heels on promises made in 2020 and due to the string of revelations about its aggressive harvesting of user data," Jamie MacEwan, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis, told Insider.

James Barford, head of telecoms research at Enders Analysis, said Cityfibre’s scale made it attractive to VMO2 as any integration costs would be spread over a larger base.

But he warned any tie-up would face scrutiny from competition regulators due to “significant overlap” between the two companies’ networks.

“I think Comcast overpaid for Sky and fantasized on very thin pan-European synergies and growth potential [but] selling a continental unit would not bring much cash in but it would send a signal to the stock market that they are serious about restructuring,” Enders Analysis analyst Francois Godard tells The Hollywood Reporter. Pointing to Sky Italia’s largely successful rollout of broadband services in Italy, Godard called the division “a solid asset. [So] why sell it at a discounted price?….I have seen no indication that Sky Italy would be up for sale. They are investing in telecoms, a long-term growth strategy consistent with the Comcast approach in the US and with Sky in the U.K.”

Sky’s Germany unit, which does not have a strong telecom or broadband component, looks more vulnerable.

Like Parker, Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis, is mostly sanguine about the prospects of GPT-4. “I’m optimistic that new AI tools will help make the process of workshopping ideas, drafting and editing smoother and more productive, letting creatives focus on what they do best: creating,” he says. But, there could still be detracting elements to the technology, adds Teasdale.

“If I have a worry, it’s for the marketing industries, where I don’t think the ability to produce unlimited copy will make us clearer communicators,” he says. “I can see a world where we’re all getting AI to produce longform prose out of bullet points, only for audiences to use that same AI to condense it back down to bullet points to make it readable. Hopefully the absurdity of that situation will force us to answer the question: do we need all this generic text?”

“Those guidelines were manifestly never reflected in the contract, nor probably those of the other many freelancers on BBC Sport,” says Alice Enders, director of research at Enders Analysis. Had the BBC fired him, she notes, the network would have been liable to pay out Lineker’s contract in full. 

“What seems clear is that the BBC does not want [Lineker] to criticize sitting members of the government,” Enders says. “And the past five years have shown how nasty and vicious some of those politicians can be and how much they would like the BBC’s license fee to disappear in a puff of smoke so they can fully occupy the airwaves with their own opinionated shows.”

Enders notes that the media focus on Lineker and the BBC — which made headlines news from day one of the crisis — had “swamped the small boats policy that Gary had sought to highlight with his original tweet” (something several commentators have suggested was the government’s intention in the first place).

“All this has put the BBC’s independence at risk, and its reputation at risk,” said Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and the founder of Enders Analysis. “That’s unfortunate because this is, at heart, a dispute over whether the BBC can impose its social media guidelines on a contractor.”