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Enders Analysis provides a subscription research service covering the media, entertainment, mobile and fixed telecommunications industries in Europe, with a special focus on new technologies and media.

Our research is independent and evidence-based, covering all sides of the market: consumers, leading companies, industry trends, forecasts and public policy & regulation. A complete list of our research can be found here.

 

Rigorous Fearless Independent

This report is free to access.

The Glasgow Climate Pact agreed at COP26 sets out national pledges to achieve net zero and contain global warming to 1.8°C above its pre-industrial levels— COP27 will buttress pledges, now at risk from the energy crisis, and advance some nations to 2030.

The TMT sector is a leader on net zero in the private sector. Companies that measure their end-to-end carbon footprint throughout their supply chain—as many do in the UK’s TMT sector—can target their GHG emissions.

The TMT sector underpins the UK’s vibrant digital economy that enables hybrid work-from-home (WFH), which reduces fossil fuel use thus heading off both the energy crisis and the climate crisis.

Mobile service revenue growth remained strong at 5% this quarter, albeit 1ppt lower than Q3 as boosts from roaming and the spring price rises diminished.

The cost-of-living crisis is becoming evident in weak net adds in the consumer segment while the B2B market remains quite robust for now.

Although the operators will implement in-contract price rises of 14-17% in April, the revenue impact will be much more muted (+4-9% for 2023), and transient (disappearing as customers recontract)—unlike their rising costs.

Broadcaster decline accelerated in 2022, with record drops in reach and time spent. This was primarily driven by the lightest and youngest viewers leaving broadcast television while over-65s also reduced their viewing for the first time.

Loss of lighter viewers threatens the future viewing base of broadcasters and relevance to a new generation. Further, broadcaster status as the home of mass audiences becomes compromised.

However, retention of lighter viewers is not yet a lost cause. They are amongst the heaviest Netflix viewers, and the very lightest are spending more time in front of the TV set than previously—suggesting enduring appetite for TV-like content.

Joseph Teasdale, the head of technology at Enders, said Twitter’s cuts were being closely scrutinised for their impact: “The big public tech companies . . . want to know: how deeply can you cut without damaging the core product? At minimum, outages at Twitter suggest that firing two thirds of your staff in a matter of months maybe comes with some negative side effects.”

He added that other failures degraded user experience. “In April last year, Musk promised, ‘If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!’ Which sounds like a bad joke to Twitter users given the proliferation of spam since the takeover. Musk has neither defeated the spam bots, nor yet died trying.”

Disney+ owner Walt Disney, for example, has a powerful North American sports business in the shape of ABC/ESPN. At present, this is a successful linear channel operation, so Disney is not in a hurry to pivot all of it to streaming. There is an ESPN+ streaming offer, sold alongside Disney+ or as part of a discounted bundle. In theory, this could be subsumed into Disney+ but Francois Godard, senior media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis says this is unlikely. “ESPN is a powerful brand which speaks to a male demo. In the same way Disney uses Star for its scripted series, there’s no rationale to close or sell the ESPN brand.”

Of those updates, the most commonly talked about are TikTok’s Creativity Program Beta (which replaced the TikTok Creator Fund and the expansion of YouTube’s Partner Program (which replaced YouTube’s Shorts Fund) — both of which were specifically created to monetize short-form video. 

But the fact still stands: “[Creator funds] are a band-aid over the fact that short-form video is not monetized as effectively as long form on YouTube or the Instagram feed, so you need additional incentives for creators to support the newer product on your platform, as well as against your competitors,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders.

“It is a challenged market for sure,” says Douglas McCabe, the chief executive at Enders Analysis. “In terms of a print business, circulation has been falling away at rates of decline that are pretty worrying, volumes are probably down around 65% over the last 10 or 12 years.

“Publishers have some levers, increase cover price and reduce pagination, but it does feel like we are getting toward a period where the industrial scale of print is looking quite small and a lot less sustainable.”

He added “The scale of online audience is very impressive but they’ve not worked out how to retain usage and build value for users. The majority of sites are nowhere near monetising sustainably. The focus seems to be on getting as many eyeballs on a page as you can, but it needs to be about what is valuable.”

Microsoft and Google are both incorporating AI-powered chatbots into their core search offering. This will create a better user experience for some search categories earlier in the customer journey.

Search is a huge prize, bigger than TV advertising, and AI represents the biggest potential shakeup to that market since the rise of mobile. With ~95% market share outside China, Google's risk is to the downside.

Search is an early, but not the most natural, home for conversational AI: Microsoft and Google have also announced integrations into productivity software. Expect a wide range of services to be transformed by AI integrations as startups and tech giants alike seek share in newly contestable markets.

“What the Times has done so well with its games strategy to date is that it replicates some of the habit friendly elements of that traditional newspaper experience,” said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis. “Everyone gets the same experience around these games on a daily rhythm.”

He added “That’s the other thing about these games the Times is focused on, they’re super cheap. It’s a great return on investment when it comes to subscriber metrics and revenue. That calculation works really well compared to actually developing what people might think a game looks like nowadays.”