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Karen said a merger with Three would be “by some margin the most value-enhancing move they could make in the UK"
She added “Certainly the signals that the CMA have been giving on other things recently does not make you optimistic.”
Gill said “It is difficult to regain all the audience that the BBC once had, but they will make some inroads into attracting 16 to 34s again, and then the hope is that those viewers might move over to watch something on BBC1 or BBC2.”
Yet surely the young are all on streaming platforms? Gill warns: “There is a common media assumption that all young people are like the university-educated, London young — and it’s not the case. TV is still viewed.” Programmes such as ITV’s I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! still perform strongly with young audiences.
Alice said this dynamic is undoubtedly at play in the case of Rogan, who signed a $100m (£75m) exclusivity deal with Spotify back in 2020. “He’s their baby and Spotify doesn’t really have a choice between Young or Rogan."
“Like a Netflix model, Spotify commissioned him, gave him a platform, and he therefore drives a lot of usage for the service. The choice is clear.”
She added “To be honest, Joe Rogan himself is the issue here and the use of his podcast as a political platform. I would imagine that Spotify is currently having a serious conversation with him about hijacking the opportunity it has given him.”
Karen said the joint venture would have to offer a better price than BT Openreach to ensure it attracted enough customers. “BT Openreach will become a competitor in a short timeframe,” she said. “It’s difficult to see how the financials stack up.”
Karen said Cevian could call for Vodafone to sell down its stake in the phone masts business Vantage Towers.
Egan also speculated that Cevian could seek improvements in the German cable business. “They massively overpaid for it and there’s a question mark over whether they should replace it with fibre — that will be very expensive."
It has been ten years since Netflix launched in the UK, initially riding the growing wave of internet video, but quickly raising viewer expectations of user experience, overall production quality and long-term availability of content—challenging the rest of the industry to keep up
Netflix’s push into original production transitioned streaming from pure catch-up or repositories of old favourites, to a vibrant entertainment option, driving the formation of an SVOD market and providing other content companies with a larger addressable base now familiar with paying for TV
The streamer has deftly navigated the path from insurgent to joining the same establishment that it radically inverted—through considerate industry participation and self-regulation—however further questions will inevitably be asked about the company’s growing influence upon Britain’s cultural fabric
Alongside freezing the licence fee for the next two years, the government made it clear that it believes the fee is no longer the optimal mechanism to fund the BBC, demonstrating a willingness to remove it in 2028
What seems to be the government's preferred replacement, a subscription, is not ideal: there are structural issues that mean it would not be possible to have a service that all could subscribe to without a costly switchover
Furthermore, a subscription would undermine a number of tenets of public service broadcasting, most notably universality, breadth of programming and representing the diversity of Britain—naturally a subscription service would pivot to commercially efficient content that targets its subscribers and those most likely to subscribe
Niamh said “In a lot of cases we don’t really know what kind of content is actually harmful, how harmful it is, or how widespread it is."
Trying to legislate before we understand this is likely a fruitless task. Part of the problem is the labyrinthine workings of tech giants like Meta or Twitter to be able to “fight” against its safety issues.
Alice said “It’s positive when traditional media companies are willing to experiment. The brands that experiment are often the ones that find new ways to engage with their audience.”