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“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’.

Apple seems satisfied with its partnership with Canal + to distribute its content and its Apple TV+ platform. Google shows no interest. He is waiting to see the results of his YouTube channels for which he has acquired the rights to broadcast NFL matches in the United States. “As for Netflix, the growth potential lies more in the cessation of account sharing, its cheaper offer with advertising, even video games,” says François Godard, at Enders Analysis.