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Matt Brittin has no direct experience in news and television. But he has joined the board of the British daily newspaper "The Guardian." "He created the Google Showcase service, which has provided significant financial support to many media outlets. He understands the importance of media pluralism," says Claire Enders of the Enders research firm. "He is a leader who can contribute a great deal to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) [the association of European public broadcasters, including France Télévisions and Radio France]," she adds.

YouTube is after “one-off events that shows that ‘youtube’ is TV, that change expectation from viewers and advertisers,” says media analyst Francois Godard of Enders Analysis.

Enders Analysis, the research firm, described the collapse of the Sora agreement as “a brutal lesson in the perils of licensing in an emerging technology sector with clear ‘deal fever’.”

Given Brittin’s CV, Claire Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis, said it was a coup for the BBC and he would have the respect of government.

“It’s quite extraordinary to have someone of that stature who has no necessity whatsoever for status,” she said. “He’s a very thoughtful and calm person who would never have applied if he hadn’t considered this deeply. I think there is an element of real public-spiritedness.

“It is very brave for someone to step into that kind of 24/7 position.”

“I think we are extraordinarily fortunate to have attracted a person of that calibre to what is a national and global institution of enormous importance in a world at war,” says Claire Enders, the founder of research company Enders Analysis. “Success for him will not be about growth, but about strategy and strength, and making a difference by shaping the news available to all for the better, here and elsewhere; that is a very big task, particularly with the financial burdens of the BBC.”

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.”