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“Culturally, Vodafone is closer to Swisscom than to Iliad, whose methods of forcing the agenda, for example anticipating the publication of a press release on its own offer, may have irritated management,” notes Karen Egan , the telecoms analyst for the London firm Enders.
Sony PlayStation’s next CEO will have hard decisions to make: compete against a resurgent multiplatform Microsoft, or retreat and defend an increasingly rickety PlayStation console model.
New gaming hardware will have an outsize influence in the year ahead, giving gamers unprecedented choice, starting with XR headsets and continuing to a likely new Nintendo Switch.
YouTube’s foray into browser-based games will be the service to watch in 2024. If successful, streaming services, including Netflix, will be on track to become heavyweight game platforms.
Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders Analysis, also sees a bigger benefit: “Unlike most industry consolidation, a merger in the mobile sector does not imply taking capacity out of the market – in fact the reverse”. So, there’d be the same amount of spectrum but more competition to fill it, potentially leading to better deals from “mobile virtual network operators”, such as Tesco, Asda and Sky that offer services via the four networks.
But some of these smaller debt-laden companies are now being squeezed by rising interest rates and disappointing uptake, resulting in slowdowns of their rollouts and more than 1,250 job cuts across the industry in 2023, according to data compiled by Enders Analysis.
James Barford, head of telecoms at the research firm, estimated total capital expenditure by altnets of between £8bn to £9bn so far. But many altnets are now “struggling due to tougher financial conditions” and deployments have been paused as “investors demand better performance on existing footprints”, Barford said.
He added consolidation was “sorely needed” but that negotiations will be challenging because some altnets will not be worth the amount invested in them. Potential acquirers will also be debating whether it is more cost effective to build or buy areas that do not overlap with their own full-fibre footprints.
Public service broadcasters are in a position to plan for the long term with commercial licences renewed for ten years, an updated prominence regime via the Media Bill and a government broadly supportive of the BBC.
With the Premier League and EFL rights secure to the end of the decade, Sky can plan for the future from a position of strength.
Relationships between Sky and the PSBs have improved markedly recently, and as all can now plan for the long-term, this should provide further opportunities to cement relationships for the benefit of the broadcasting ecosystem and viewers.
Tom Harrington, head of television for Enders Analysis, said people were only prepared to pay for a maximum of three video subscriptions — with Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video emerging as the dominant players. Newer entrants such as Paramount+, NBCUniversal’s Peacock and Warner Bros Discovery’s Max are expected to struggle in the battle for subscribers. “If you’re watching one service, then your sense of the value for money that the others provide is lowering,” he said.
He pointed to the market-leading 45 minutes per day users spend with Netflix as driving its unexpected success in converting “parasitic” users who have been password sharing for up to a decade.
“The outperformance of this initiative is fundamentally a testament to the product itself,” he said. “If you have been getting something for free for a long period of time then it is difficult to persuade people to pay but Netflix appears to have converted many non-paying users.”
RedBird IMI is pitching for the Telegraph and Spectator by lending the money to the Barclay family to settle all of its debt to Lloyds Banking Group (LBG), suspending the auction of the media assets by Goldman Sachs and upsetting the bidders.
Strong political headwinds to RedBird IMI did not take long to emerge in the UK, with the Secretary of State for DCMS, Lucy Frazer, “minded to” issue a Public Interest Intervention Notice (PIIN), as early as this week.
Jeff Zucker, CEO of RedBird IMI, is in London this week to promote the deal and respond to concerns over the public interest by making assurances to the UK authorities.
Karen Egan, analyst at Enders, said the merger would be likely to be referred for a so-called Phase 2 inquiry. “Clearly there will be a degree of overlap as they both offer telecoms services across an array of customer types, but the bulk of their customer bases are helpfully quite different, as the Vodafone brand has been more successful at the high end of the consumer market, while Three is much more of a value proposition,” she said.
