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Tom said “People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: ‘what’s next?’ From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it’s clearly unsustainable.”
Claire Enders of Enders Analysis suspects that “where this review is heading is where all the reviews have always headed”—that is, a recommendation that the licence fee should remain. That may not be the end of it: the Lords committee argued that the bbc’s funding model should be made fairer, which could suggest more means testing. Discounts could be extended to households on universal credit, say, with the rich making up the shortfall.
Abi said “These latest results [from BBC Commercial] were very good,” she said. “But they were largely explained by a strong flow of pent-up advertising revenue. We expect advertising revenue to fall in the years ahead.”
Gill said the BBC decision comes as a surprise. "You would think if the BBC is going to be doubling down on anything, they would be doubling down on news. Quite clearly, they have had severe cuts to the licence fee over the last few years and there are more huge cuts coming through. And given the cost of inflation, they are getting absolutely nothing. They do have to make some cuts somewhere. There will be some additional fat, but not a lot."
"What is slightly strange, however, is that you are going to have a 24-hour news channel by the BBC that is not focused mainly on UK stories. You do wonder if you get another big breaking story like Prince Philip dying, would they have that infrastructure in place to immediately change everything and really focus on that?"
"The transfer of the holding company to Amsterdam represents for Berlusconi a first step in the internationalization of Mediaset", estimates François Godard of Enders Analysis who is betting on a merger with the German private channel ProSieben. "For the future, the success or failure of the TF1-M6 merger will determine the future of free-to-air television in Europe, paving the way for mergers on a national or international scale."
Mobile service revenue growth rose to its highest level in over ten years (+4.5%) as a result of the operators’ higher-than-inflation price rises.
BT/EE fared best with broadly-applied, sizeable increases and robust churn while H3G’s more modest increases and later timing led to just a minor pickup in its service revenue growth—in spite of continued strong performance on the subscriber side.
There are some early signs of an increase in consumer bargain-hunting and some payment challenges, with B2B robust for now but with an increasingly rocky outlook.
Meta suffered its first year-on-year revenue decline in Q2, as long-standing challenges crystalise and an economic slowdown in the US dents display ad spend.
In response, Meta is retooling its products to neutralise threats from post-social competitors like TikTok, and trying to minimise the impact of data restrictions.
The long-term pivot to the metaverse is Zuckerberg's next big bet, but funding it depends on core business strength.
Julian Aquilina, Senior TV Analyst at Enders Analysis, points out that younger people could end up watching broadcaster-produced content without realising it. “If they’re not in the habit of going to the BBC or ITV as their first port of call, but instead they’re defaulting to Netflix or YouTube and seeing what is being recommended, then that’s a cause of concern for broadcasters."
“There are certain genres which are going to lend themselves better to the live broadcast TV experience, and that will continue into the future,” continues Aquilina. “So yes, the broadcasters are probably going to lose more audiences over time, but there’s always going to be a base level which people need to go to broadcast TV for their viewing.”
