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Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis, said the audiences for unregulated channels were tiny compared to linear TV but were growing.

She said it was right for Ofcom to consider how to regulate these channels but that there could be challenges depending on who owned them.

"If it is existing broadcasters then this is relatively simple, but it is so easy to launch a new service - what if it were a news channel launched by a company with little interest in impartial news?" she said.

Announcing the plans at a Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said: "We recognise that internet provided TV is growing.

"But while this shift is an exciting one, it's our job to look at those channels that fall outside our existing regulations."

Media analyst Claire Enders calculated that Rupert had created $150bn of wealth since inheriting his father’s Adelaide newspaper in the 1950s.  However, she said that his authority had suffered in recent years. This year’s failure to merge Fox and News Corp “showed that he no longer had total control over the shareholders”, she said. “The massive pay-off to Dominion also diminished his standing.”

Alice Enders, of the media research firm Enders Analysis, said: “Rupert has always played an outsized role in his businesses. For example, people know it is Rupert Murdoch who is interested in buying the Spectator. Normally you’d find people saying it’s the company – ‘News Corp is interested’. Rupert is still very much in control.”

Enders said Rupert is not leaving the stage: “While it is very much the end of an era, the fact is he retains the ownership interest in the family trust, which to be honest gives him the same power whether he is in the saddle or on the deck chair.”

Gareth Sutcliffe, games analyst at Enders Analysis, a consultancy, said: “With cloud gaming such a small sector of the overall industry, the [provisional] approval represents a grand compromise for both parties, with the most important components of the deal still intact.”

“It’s always going to be a challenge replicating TikTok’s Chinese e-commerce business, which is worth hundreds of billions a year, but this is a company with a very tight focus, knowledge of how to make the tech work, and a willingness to sink billions to get there,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis.

“It is a uniquely terrible idea,” said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis.

“The reason anyone is on Twitter is because of the other people who are there. Doing something that would cause huge volumes of people to leave, like charging users, will undermine the fundamental value of the platform.

“Twitter’s problem historically was the amount of friction involved in onboarding new users – charging will supercharge, not solve, that problem.”

The new platform will offer a common program guide. “Freely wants to give channels back, on connected televisions, the pre-eminence they had on DTT,” summarises Gill Hind, director of television at Enders Analysis.

"We are in an experience economy where people crave going out and participating in social events," Alice Enders, a music industry analyst at Enders Analysis and a former senior economist at the World Trade Organization told CNN. "It's no surprise that people are flocking to this Eras Tour experience in what is increasingly an otherwise digital environment we live in."