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Saturday’s leader in the Telegraph op-ed pages called for a fast sale without a reserve price to expedite the process – a sharp contrast with its recent demands for thorough investigation and regulatory examination of the RedBird bid. “Telegraph Media Group’s 2024 performance lands where you might expect a business trapped in a two-year ownership freeze,” said Abi Watson at Enders Analysis. “Its topline was essentially flat - up 1% to £279m - with operating profit broadly unchanged. The deeper issue is structural. TMG still derives 55% of revenue from print, or closer to 60% if you strip out ‘other revenues’ like platform licensing and eCommerce. Digital subscriptions and digital advertising together account for around 40% of core revenues, but they are still not scaling fast enough to offset print erosion - not exactly what any bidder would want to see in a legacy-to-digital transition story.”

“It is so difficult to prove defamation in the US, and for a program that Americans have not seen,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst and founder of Enders Analysis. “There is no basis for the lawsuit, and there would be no basis for a settlement.”

Expanded capabilities notwithstanding, Netflix will still need to expand its controller offerings beyond mobile devices to include more traditional gaming controllers if it wants to grow its portfolio beyond party games, according to Gareth Sutcliffe, the head analyst covering the games industry for the market research service Enders Analysis. 

“Supporting kids’ gaming specifically, which they’ve publicly stated is a priority, clearly needs a non-mobile-phone controller option,” Sutcliffe said in an interview with GamesBeat. “A controller reference design that OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] support would begin a ramp to a richer game service, increased advertising TAM [total addressable market], and possible games subscription tier.”

“If there are better services available elsewhere and there is more innovation and there is more choice, then consumers are going to move in that direction, even if that includes piracy,” says Gareth Sutcliffe, from tech researchers Enders Analysis. He says the situation has “become very acute” and had “developed mostly for the worse over the last few years”.

So what, if anything, can solve the issue?

“Innovation is a great response to piracy,” says Sutcliffe. “It addresses the fact that people not only want access, but they may actually want something different because they are moving faster than broadcasters or content owners are moving themselves.”

Gareth Sutcliffe is a leading tech researcher from Enders Analysis, who speaks on a range of topics in the episode, including the role of the Fire TV Stick device. He says that the previous — and still widely used — device made by Amazon “enables piracy” and that it’s “a broadly risky device for consumer safety”.

Sutcliffe says it “provides a very easy path for malware to enter into a home-computing environment”, there were “policies around developing apps for that device that Amazon took a certain position on and broadly got wrong” as they had made “an open computing device” that was a playground for “a whole world of nefarious actors”.