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Francois said “If Apple comes to Europe and starts buying rights, like Amazon, at some point prices may start rising again. I don’t know if there will be room left for someone like DAZN."
Francois is “sceptical” about DAZN’s ambitions in these areas. “Betting has far less barriers to entry than sports video,” he said. “Once you have the broadcast rights, nobody can launch against you. In betting, it’s much more fluid, it’s much more competitive and almost anybody can create something.”
The Guardian has posted a stellar set of results: its highest annual revenues since the 2008 financial crash, and a £22.7 million upswing in operating cashflows, putting it into positive territory for the first time in decades
Looking ahead to 2022/23, the Guardian (alongside every other news publisher) faces the twin headwinds of the cost-of-living crisis and news fatigue
There are levers for the Guardian to pull to maintain growth, increase monetisation, and minimise churn
Canal+, however, would have enough leverage to strike an exclusive distribution deal with this new HBO-Discovery+ service to aggregate it as part of its cable bundle in a pact similar to the one it signed with Disney + in France, according to Francois Godard at Enders Analysis. Godard also predicts such deal would have strong chances of being approved by the anti-trust board.
In 2011, the anti-trust board blocked Canal+ Group’s attempt to merge with OCS and launch a premium pay TV channel, but Godard says “the world has changed and Canal+ is no longer dominating the French market.” “Watchdog authorities are aware that Canal+ must consolidate to face off global streamers like Disney which are spend €30 billion in content this year,” Godard continued. “Canal+’s strategy today is to increase their scale, they’re on a world market and they need to ramp up their worth and subscriber base to finance bigger productions,” the analyst continued.
Netflix lost net subscribers for the second quarter in a row (-970k) but the results were marked as "less bad", being better than what was forecast. More mature streaming regions—UCAN (-1.3 million) and EMEA (-770k)—were propped up by APAC (+1.1 million)
Netflix's advertising tier is rapidly taking shape with Microsoft announced as a global tech partner, but its impact on the UK video ad market—at least in the short term—will be small
In the US, the most mature Netflix market, churn appears to be growing as the subscriber base struggles to grow. However, price rises are more than offsetting this growing churn, a window into the future of other territories
Analyst at Enders Analysis Tom Harrington warned that such a move could undermine the “purity” of big streamers, and told City A.M. that the major selling point of no adverts and low prices are “now being eroded before our eyes
UK altnet full fibre rollouts are accelerating, with an aggregate build pace close to that of Openreach, but customer acquisition is not growing at the same pace, and overbuild in the most attractive areas is becoming a significant issue.
Altnet business models remain challenging and are getting worse as Openreach builds out, and (although there are some notable exceptions) most will need to rapidly achieve scale and turn around their performance to survive.
Consolidation is very likely, along with business failures, and while some market share loss for Openreach looks likely as serious scale players emerge, the downside is limited, and even more so for retail ISPs.
Francois said “If approved, this decision will potentially reset the European television market in a way liberalisation and commercial television reshaped the market in the 1980s. It is absolutely crucial.”
Francois said “All of its competitors have sports. Netflix is alone without sports, so you could see it bowing to market pressure.”
Godard credits Netflix for showing “discipline” and for not “losing its mind” by overbidding for the rights. It does of course raise the question of whether it can afford to.
James said “Virgin Media has been saying for a few years that it would be interested in a discount sub-brand so it makes sense. Virgin Media could also over time shift TalkTalk over to its network, which would be very lucrative,” he added, noting that TalkTalk only bought internet services from wholesale providers such as BT’s Openreach.
BT’s share price fell more than 8 per cent before the close on Friday.
“I think that regulators will remain extremely sceptical of mobile-to-mobile mergers and fixed-to-fixed mergers."