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Karen Egan, at Enders Analysis, argues that the regulatory process “was always going to be thus”.

“It’s a big move and I think the whole country needs to feel like it’s been properly thought through,” she says. “They came to the right decision and it’s good that they took their time.”

“I suppose it’s inevitable in these joint ventures that everyone’s going to be looking after their own self-interest, particularly as the final touches are put to the agreement,” says Egan.

“I imagine that [CK Hutchison] are especially nervous about being easily shunted into the background unless they’re on the front foot and protecting their interests at every opportunity.”

Enders’ analysts reckon some European markets may have seen annual rates of increase in mobile-data demand as low as 5% in recent quarters, though there is significant variation between countries. 

Douglas McCabe, at Enders Analysis, said: “If I’m being pessimistic, [local media is] still not at the bottom — there’s still some pain ahead.”

Pirated streaming of sports and premium TV is costing broadcasters and sports bodies billions of dollars a year, constituting “industrial scale theft of video services”, according to media analysts at Enders. 

Enders found that pirated feeds account for a “double digit percentage” of all viewing of premium sports and television, based on private data from broadcasters and analysis of internet data, though it was unable to put an exact figure on the scale of the problem.

A single pirated stream of a high-profile event, particularly a live football match, can attract “tens of thousands” of people, according to Enders, which on Friday will release a report analysing data from European TV groups. It found that this number may be multiplied many times when these streams are shared on social media.

Amazon Fire Sticks are enabling “billions of dollars” worth of streaming piracy, according to a report today from Enders Analysis, a media, entertainment, and telecommunications research firm. Technologies from other media conglomerates, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are also enabling what the report’s authors deem an “industrial scale of theft."

The report, "Video piracy: Big tech is clearly unwilling to address the problem," focuses on the European market but highlights the global growth of piracy of streaming services as they increasingly acquire rights to live programs, like sporting events.

The research by Enders Analysis accuses Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft of "ambivalence and inertia" over a problem it says costs broadcasters revenue and puts users at an increased risk of cyber-crime.

Gareth Sutcliffe and Ollie Meir, who authored the research, described the Amazon Fire Stick - which they argue is the device many people use to access illegal streams - as "a piracy enabler".

Enders say there are often multiple streams of individual events - such as high profile football games - each of which can have tens of thousands of people watching them.

“What perhaps the AI ‘black box’ can guarantee is a certain level of performance from advertisers who otherwise aren’t savvy about more manual campaign management,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “And Amazon has to offer this solution competitively with Google and Meta’s equivalents to ensure it’s offering the full suite of expected services, as more advertisers get used to buying this way.”