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Douglas said “We’re all bombarded with information, and a weekly digest just seems to make an awful lot of sense."
“This is a very resilient sector,” he added, drawing a comparison with other genres that “are all but disappearing”, such as celebrity gossip and men’s interest.
Douglas said “The Sun is a challenged business and the company doesn’t yet have its arms around what to do with it strategically. The brand’s confidence has been hit for sure, but it remains relevant and there are always opportunities: what might it merge with or acquire? The Sun can be a huge network play."
He added “News UK is building an overall scale platform; ‘We aren’t just newspapers, we are a conglomerate’. You need to innovate to fly and you can’t criticise them for experimenting and looking at different models. News Corporation has always had a swagger, an extraordinary confidence, but in recent times I’m not sure News UK has quite had it. This is about getting that swagger back.”
The transition from linear to digital and on-demand usage has the potential to unravel national television ecosystems. Global tech monopolists may eventually control the interface and content discovery paths, pushing European providers down the supply chain.
Maintaining cultural sovereignty over the industry’s architecture is a prerequisite of a thriving, pluralistic ‘electronic public square’, as well as a high performing and locally-relevant creative economy.
Only consolidated commercial broadcasters have sufficient scale to steer national markets towards digital models where European content providers retain prominence and their ability to set the popular cultural agenda.
Douglas said they will need to do further restructuring involving axing titles and layoffs. Iwan Le Moine of emge, a British paper-industry consultancy, expects a big increase in 2022 of the number of papers that shut compared with a typical year. That will lower demand and nudge the market back towards equilibrium.But newspapers will have more hard conversations about paper, full stop.
Karen said “I think some investors have become confused with the alt-nets. They are thinking ‘big investment and secure returns. So far, they have only seen big investments and forgotten about the returns."
“The overbuild issue [from Openreach and Virgin Media O2] is something the [alt-nets] would like to skirt over."
Douglas said “It’s all about the market business now."
Douglas said “One of the effects of the pandemic is that it’s accelerated structural change that’s been going on for some time. The transition from physical retail to online retail, the transition of offline media to online media... all of those structural changes were rapidly accelerated. In actual fact, about five years of change – from the perspective of business planning – was probably in effect executed overnight due to the pandemic."
He added “I think that had an upside effect. I think it gave some people confidence in the fundamentals of media businesses in a way that they were still worried about them at the end of 2019 and early 2020. Which is to say that the transition was expected to take a long time, and it was to be very expensive."
Tom said “If you’re a new service and you’re not spending as much on content as Netflix, you can’t feasibly argue to the consumer that you’re offering something better. You certainly can’t offer more, so you have to undercut them.” He added: “It’s an artificial price environment that can’t last for ever — and not everyone will win.”
