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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.

 

Rigorous Fearless Independent

Who wins from the AI boom: A dive into the value chain

13 March 2024

Recent advances in 'Artificial Intelligence' have generated excitement, investment and improved valuations, on the plausible promise of greater efficiency in a range of areas, such as health and coding.

It is still not clear who will profit from this boom. Currently chip-maker NVIDIA is cleaning up, propelled by sales to model developers, also driving demand for cloud computing services.

Leverage in the AI value chain depends on differentiation and barriers to entry, which are high in the chips industry. AI services like chatbots have much lower barriers to entry, while deeper vertical integration of more stages of the value chain could shake things up.

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ITV FY 2023 results: Ad downturn hits profits

12 March 2024

As guided, ITV’s advertising performance was down 8% year-on-year (£1.8 billion), while Studios performed slightly better than expected (+4%, £2.2 billion): meaning that adjusted EBITA, while challenged (-32%, £489 million) could have been worse given the trials of H1

Unsurprisingly, ITV has announced an acceleration of its cost-cutting measures which intensifies an earlier hiring freeze: costs have risen 19% since before COVID, while revenues are only up 10%

ITVX continues its strong growth, and although we think that this needs to be contextualised, there are unintended but encouraging signs for the broadcaster

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No industry for the sub-scale: Mobile telecoms

11 March 2024

With the returns of the mobile industry at the forefront of a range of policy issues including in the EC White Paper and the prospective Vodafone/Three merger, we take a fresh look at its economics.

Higher network costs due to government and subscriber demands are hitting the sub-scale operators disproportionately, limiting their ability to tailor their network to their market position.

Our analysis of the UK market suggests that H3G would need a market share of 23% at today’s price levels to earn even the most basic return on capital—an unrealistic prospect. With the fixed market likely to evolve to a patchwork of one/two/three-player areas, three nationwide mobile networks could still be a strong result.

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François Godard was quoted in Handelsblatt on "Do Netflix, Apple & Co. dominate the Oscars?"

11 March 2024

François Godard, Senior Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis, explains Netflix's success with the platform's market power: “Only Netflix can publish a series that the whole world is talking about. The others need the cinema for that.” The streaming providers don’t have to lure viewers into the movie theater with their productions, but rather just to pick up the remote control on the couch. “Netflixen” has even made it into the dictionary as a verb for an evening of film and television.

While there used to be months between the cinema premiere and release on DVD, Bluray or streaming portals, it is now only weeks or days - if at all. “The cinema releases have become shorter and shorter,” says analyst Godard. And that's a problem for movie theaters.

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Tom Harrington was quoted in the Daily Mail on "Has Hollywood lost the plot?Tinseltown used to make films that surprised and delighted, now it's just dull spin offs and stale sequels"

11 March 2024

‘The need for expensive content to cut through immediately is huge,’ says Tom Harrington of industry specialist Enders Analysis. UK broadcasters’ budgets are increasingly being squeezed by falling ad revenue and a frozen licence fee. 

The financial pressures have meant fewer commissions overall, with a headline in the industry journal Broadcast in January saying they had fallen ‘across the board’ in 2023. When commissioners do green-light a project, they are playing it safe. ‘[They know] sequels, spinoffs and reboots are successful, so each year there’s a doubling down,’ says Harrington. 

‘TV is no different, thanks to international streamers and algorithms. But it’s not just the streamers – the BBC relaunching Gladiators or ITV commissioning regular true-crime dramas is the same on a smaller scale.’

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Gareth Sutcliffe was quoted in The Standard on "When even PlayStation is laying off staff, what hope is there for the rest of the gaming industry?"

8 March 2024

One reason, according to Gareth Sutcliffe of analytical company Enders Analysis, is that although “all of these games companies are inherently profitable, what happened during the pandemic is that they went on kind of a hiring binge and the cost of labour during that period was really, really high.

“They were paying over and above the odds for developer talent; for engineering talent; for all of the kind of stuff that was used to make games and so what we're now getting is a correction.”

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Tom Harrington was quoted in The Telegraph on "In a bad Way: why the BBC’s weird Welsh drama failed"

7 March 2024

One clear problem with The Way is that it just didn’t belong on BBC One, points out Tom Harrington, head of television at media experts Enders Analysis. “The Way’s major hindrance is that it is not really a BBC One drama – its tone and intent is more in line with what you would have expected from BBC Two.” With fewer original BBC dramas being commissioned – the broadcaster’s original television budget was cut by close to £100m over the past 12 months as part of a commissioning freeze – “almost everything now gets put on the main channel and has the ratings expectations that come with that.”

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Telecoms and net zero: Broadening the scope

7 March 2024

Direct greenhouse gas emissions from the UK telecoms sector equate to around 0.1-0.3% of the UK total. Most operators have set targets to reach net zero across their direct emissions in the next 10-20 years, with the move to electric vehicles an obvious win.

Network upgrades to 5G and fibre have the potential to cut emissions from electricity by a factor of 10, and consolidation offers further decarbonisation upside.

The industry could enable emissions savings in other sectors equivalent up to 30x its own by averting the need to travel and through IoT applications, with the latter requiring careful commercial assessment given the financial constraints in the industry.

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