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.
CityFibre is progressing well on subscriber growth and EBITDA, albeit consolidation is going much more slowly than we (and likely they) expected.
Recent developments point to altnet consolidation accelerating in 2026, with CityFibre and VMO2 still by far the most likely acquirors.
The impact on the rest of the sector is that some much-needed relief to the retail broadband market is likely, albeit with altnet wholesale gains accelerating
Q4 saw Netflix’s revenue grow 18% YoY (to $12.1 billion), with the subscription base growing 8% across the year. Advertising is now a $1.5 billion business, which is around 3% of total revenues
In the past, Christmas and New Year has been a time for Netflix to make considerable and important gains in the UK, this progression has now stalled
As the fight to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery lurches on, Netflix’s interest in the theatrical business is being scrutinised. The relationship between the cinema and Pay 1 window will inform its strategic direction
Enders Analysis, the consultancy firm, has estimated that the combination of the Telegraph Media Group and DMGT would create a group controlling 30 per cent of the total revenues generated from the national newspaper market.
Apple News now reaches c.14m monthly users in the UK, making it one of the largest news distribution environments by scale. This reach is driven by default placement on iOS and editorial curation, rather than open-platform referral dynamics.
We estimate there are c.1.7m Apple News+ subscriptions in the UK thanks to Apple One bundling, enabling users to access premium journalism via a subscription they already pay for. News+ revenues are particularly valuable for publishers without strong standalone subscription engines.
Publishers face a clear trade-off: Apple News drives real but bounded reach and revenue, but deepens dependence on a gatekeeper with opaque rules, limited data, and growing power over discovery.
“The buying-up of vodcasts is a direct response by Netflix to the threat of YouTube, by providing more ‘ambient’ or background content to its subscribers,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. He suggests it will also help answer a few nagging questions about podcasts.
“Big podcasts are pushing the boat out more in terms of video production, which means they are turning into TV shows,” Harrington says. “Everything is television now.”
The mainstream view in the telecoms industry is that satellite broadband will never be a mass market proposition. “In fixed broadband, satellite costs are still a multiple of the average costs of traditional networks, only becoming competitive for a proportion of the hardest 1pc of households to reach,” argued a note from Enders Analysis. Well, perhaps. For now, it is certainly true that providing broadband access via satellite is much more expensive than via a fibre-optic cable running along your street. It will struggle to attract more than a handful of customers living in very remote areas.
The UK’s “altnet” broadband sector is struggling with a net debt of more than £9bn, according to data from Enders Analysis, following rapid growth after the pandemic.
Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said the G.Network case had shown “that lenders can act quite decisively and are relatively quick to accept harsh writedowns once hope is lost.”
“While it’s painful for equity investors in particular right now in the altnet space, once the challenging economics of most of these ventures becomes irrefutable, the faster an alternative course is taken the better it is for all concerned,” she added.
“It’s one of those really interesting areas that flew under the radar for slightly too long because it hadn’t been considered an explicit thing,” Claire Holubowsky, a senior analyst at media strategist Enders Analysis, tells City AM “But all the conditions for its success have been there for 20 years.”
“Advertising is a much higher margin business,” says Holubowsky. “A lot of the significance to supermarkets isn’t quite visible yet. But then that’s beginning to change as everyone realises that retail media is big. And it’s not going away.”
“It’s clever of Amazon to include free television. This kind of partnership costs the distributor relatively little, but it allows them to keep users longer in order to then sell them other products,” explains François Godard, an analyst at Enders.