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An investor like Saudi Arabia is unlike most market participants, said Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis, a research firm focusing on the media, entertainment and telecoms sectors. For the kingdom, financial success matters less than the increased visibility for the sports properties it owns, including its top soccer league.

“It’s a very different proposition for the Saudis,” Ms. Hind said. “They’re doing it for different reasons than would be typical for other investors.”

Finally there is the “market failure” model, where the corporation provides only what its commercial competitors do not do sufficiently, such as news and high-brow culture coverage. The problem is that if the BBC is not serving a mass audience it risks swiftly losing public backing. Claire Enders, a media analyst and founder of Enders Analysis, says that every time the corporation tries to scrap a service, it is met with a furore. “They get hundreds of thousands of responses saying. ‘Don’t touch a hair on the head of 6 Music.’”

Subscribers to streaming platforms get access to all of the content on them so it isn't possible to attribute revenue to specific shows. In turn, it isn't possible to tell whether they made a profit or a loss. As Tom Harrington of media consultants Enders Analysis explained, "given the structure of the streaming model it is almost impossible to robustly attribute profitability to any single piece of content."

In one sense, this is all small change to Apple which – as of March 2024 – was the world’s seventh largest company by revenue, earning $97 billion in income from a turnover of $383 billion. The company’s problem, according to Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis, is that growth over the last couple of decades has come through selling iPhones at a high price to the world’s wealthy.

“Apple TV+ is never going to be a particularly broad service given the reverence that has to be shown to the Apple brand, but currently it appeals to so few,” Harrington points out. “This has caused it to then undermine its own value with free offers and deals. The future is difficult to map due to the reluctance of management to ever explain what the actual point of the service is – Tim Cook has mentioned in the past that content decisions are not ‘purely financial’, for example – and aggregating its metrics with other Apple subscriptions.”

“The loss of 250,000 subscribers in the wake of The Post’s non-endorsement has highlighted the fragilities in the subscription model,” said Enders Analysis senior research analyst Abi Watson. “Acting in ways contra to a publisher’s perceived values—Democracy dies in darkness, etc—will turn off subscribers because it’s effectively acting against their own personal values.”

Channel 5 is set to revamp its BVOD service this year, as parent company Paramount seeks to update the existing My5 service. Research from Enders Analysis, based on Barb data, shows that BVOD viewing currently makes up significantly less of Channel 5’s viewing compared to other UK commercial broadcasters.

Collective losses among the so-called altnets hit £1.3bn in 2023, according to a survey of the companies’ most recently published accounts by research group Enders Analysis, which warns the picture will not improve this year. James Barford, director of telecoms, said “2024 might well be worse due to increasing interest costs”.

A report published by Enders Analysis in October said weaker than expected penetration was a critical driver for the collective losses.