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“King have done a masterful job in keeping Candy Crush relevant and enticing,” said Gareth Sutcliffe, equities analyst at Enders analysis, “there is no reason to doubt that AI will provide a useful angle to attract and retain audience.”

“The broader issue is King’s lack of portfolio diversification and inability to replicate such a successful franchise. The eventual new owners, Microsoft, will be right to expect more,” he added.

But Canal+ has not given up on Ligue 1: if the call for tenders fails, the group could negotiate over the counter. Or even, in the event of failure, continue to offer Ligue 1 but as a distributor, thanks to its contracts with the Qatari channel BeIN Sports and the British platform Dazn (pronounced “da zone” ). “The contract with Dazn is a spare wheel for Canal+” , deciphers François Godard, of the Enders Analysis firm.

Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at media research service Enders Analysis, said: 'Amazon working with other AI companies isn't new, but this is a big lean in.

'Amazon approaches AI at all levels, from the chips to the software, so this new investment is simply putting their money where their mouth is.'

Top-flight French football still fetches far less revenue for its TV broadcast rights than other European leagues. “The Bundesliga and Serie A take 50 per cent more, La Liga almost twice as much and the Premier League almost three times,” wrote Enders Analysis in a recent note. “Ligue 1 wants to break with its recent history of failed tenders, declining revenues and soured relations with incumbent Canal+,” Enders added.

Murdoch has long opposed the BBC and ABC in Australia, but has failed to bring them down. He has invested heavily in journalism, including investigative reporting – the Times/Sunday Times recently broke the story of allegations on the conduct of Russell Brand, together with Channel 4’s Dispatches. We anticipate that Murdoch, soon to become chair emeritus of News Corp, will remain as attached as he has always been to the UK titles.

Claire and Alice Enders are the founder and director of research at Enders Analysis

Those investors may be reassured by Mr Murdoch’s more modest new title. In recent years analysts have come to speak of a “Murdoch discount” applied to Fox and News Corp. Mr Murdoch’s new title means that “his interface with the public markets is over,” says Claire Enders, a media analyst. “But it is obvious that he is the ultimate decision-maker as long as he is alive.”

“HBO is a niche channel that has been very successful as a premium add-on to basic cable packages,” says Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis. “It has quite a small amount of output and with a couple of very obvious exceptions viewing is generally small. That didn’t make it the best candidate to underpin a mass-market streamer. The Discovery content expands the audience for Max but counterintuitively pushes the amount they can charge down. This also indicates some sort of dilution of the perceptual value of HBO content which has been going on for a while. The previous owners and the current owners keep telling HBO it needs to make more programming, which makes quality control hard.”

‘Microsoft should have avoided this long and expensive slog to approval altogether - they ignored every signal from the CMA and UK market requirements,’ said Gareth Sutcliffe, games analyst at Enders Analysis.

But he added the value of the deal was ‘still intact’ and was ‘a relief for inward investment in the UK game development sector’.