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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

The Government will enact a new ban on foreign states acquiring UK print news media, forcing Redbird IMI to end its pursuit of Telegraph Media Group (TMG).

The new law adds a further criterion to the regulatory scrutiny of media mergers on competition and public interest grounds, but there remain questions about its scope.

The new law will collide with the completion of Phase 1 of the regulatory process on public interest grounds by the Secretary of State (SoS), unless RedBird IMI surrenders.

“Frankly, there is no one silver bullet platform,” says Abi Watson, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. “There has been a huge proliferation of platforms and changes where people spend their time online.”

“Google’s monopoly over search is an obvious risk,” says Watson, while “longer-term risk of an AI-enabled search engine that cuts publishers out entirely is an existential risk.” Google has reportedly begun paying some smaller publishers to test an AI tool that lets them scrape other news sites’ content and aggregate it into a new article, a practice that a news industry executive called “potentially troubling.”

“The benefit of LinkedIn is that it has some aligned incentives with publishers. LinkedIn wants to become the centre of people’s online professional life, rather than a platform they visit during a job search,” says Watson.

Streaming profitability beckons, but owes much to the profitable services folded into companies’ DTC segments alongside the headline streamers.

There is a broader move towards bundling and price rises. The former bolsters subscriber additions and lifetime value but is ARPU-dilutive, while price rises will bump up both ARPU and churn.

2024 marks the first year with multiple players at scale in the ad space, as Prime Video entered the market. Other streamers with high CPMs and lower scale may be forced to re-examine their offerings.

Recent advances in 'Artificial Intelligence' have generated excitement, investment and improved valuations, on the plausible promise of greater efficiency in a range of areas, such as health and coding.

It is still not clear who will profit from this boom. Currently chip-maker NVIDIA is cleaning up, propelled by sales to model developers, also driving demand for cloud computing services.

Leverage in the AI value chain depends on differentiation and barriers to entry, which are high in the chips industry. AI services like chatbots have much lower barriers to entry, while deeper vertical integration of more stages of the value chain could shake things up.

As guided, ITV’s advertising performance was down 8% year-on-year (£1.8 billion), while Studios performed slightly better than expected (+4%, £2.2 billion): meaning that adjusted EBITA, while challenged (-32%, £489 million) could have been worse given the trials of H1

Unsurprisingly, ITV has announced an acceleration of its cost-cutting measures which intensifies an earlier hiring freeze: costs have risen 19% since before COVID, while revenues are only up 10%

ITVX continues its strong growth, and although we think that this needs to be contextualised, there are unintended but encouraging signs for the broadcaster

With the returns of the mobile industry at the forefront of a range of policy issues including in the EC White Paper and the prospective Vodafone/Three merger, we take a fresh look at its economics.

Higher network costs due to government and subscriber demands are hitting the sub-scale operators disproportionately, limiting their ability to tailor their network to their market position.

Our analysis of the UK market suggests that H3G would need a market share of 23% at today’s price levels to earn even the most basic return on capital—an unrealistic prospect. With the fixed market likely to evolve to a patchwork of one/two/three-player areas, three nationwide mobile networks could still be a strong result.

François Godard, Senior Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis, explains Netflix's success with the platform's market power: “Only Netflix can publish a series that the whole world is talking about. The others need the cinema for that.” The streaming providers don’t have to lure viewers into the movie theater with their productions, but rather just to pick up the remote control on the couch. “Netflixen” has even made it into the dictionary as a verb for an evening of film and television.

While there used to be months between the cinema premiere and release on DVD, Bluray or streaming portals, it is now only weeks or days - if at all. “The cinema releases have become shorter and shorter,” says analyst Godard. And that's a problem for movie theaters.

‘The need for expensive content to cut through immediately is huge,’ says Tom Harrington of industry specialist Enders Analysis. UK broadcasters’ budgets are increasingly being squeezed by falling ad revenue and a frozen licence fee. 

The financial pressures have meant fewer commissions overall, with a headline in the industry journal Broadcast in January saying they had fallen ‘across the board’ in 2023. When commissioners do green-light a project, they are playing it safe. ‘[They know] sequels, spinoffs and reboots are successful, so each year there’s a doubling down,’ says Harrington. 

‘TV is no different, thanks to international streamers and algorithms. But it’s not just the streamers – the BBC relaunching Gladiators or ITV commissioning regular true-crime dramas is the same on a smaller scale.’