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“At a certain level of money, it is control that matters the most,” says Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis and a longtime Murdoch watcher. “What this transition is about is future control and restoration of the original structure of News Corp and a long-term umbrella for the newspaper assets.”
Britain’s most respected media analyst, Claire Enders, has backed Rupert Murdoch’s proposal to merge Fox Corporation and News Corporation, labelling the potential deal “tremendous” and said it signalled that he had emerged from hibernation.
Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis who has worked in and analysed the media and telecommunications’ sectors for the past four decades, met News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks on Monday to discuss the deal.
After two quarters losing net subscribers (-1.2 million), Netflix grew subs in Q3, adding 2.4 million (up to 223 million), driven by APAC but with all regions back to an upward trajectory. The company's attempt to focus attention off subs and onto revenue hit a snag, though—due to F/X this was down quarter-on-quarter
Netflix's ad-supported tier will be launched in the UK on 3 November; while it will not alleviate churn it will increase the perceptual value of the more popular and expensive Standard tier. With BARB not measuring incremental reach and frequency of its commercial impacts, Netflix will still have a job to prove value to advertisers
The declaration of Netflix's UK revenue firms up our understanding of the company's paying base, and provides insight into the number of households that are getting the service for free—revealing the revenue potential of measures to counteract this freeloading culture, but also the prevalence of it
Julian Aquilina, senior TV analyst at Enders Analysis, suggests that each streaming service "must have content that makes them stand out" in order to survive.
"There's been fierce competition between platforms to get their hands on the best pieces of content; the last few years have been a golden age for scripted content," he says.
He added "Clearly Netflix, Disney, and others believe that offering people the option of a cheaper service with adverts opens up some headroom for growth."
Vodafone is in the midst of a flurry of M&A, likely driven by its share price, which is at a 30-year-low, and stubbornly high leverage as an economic crisis looms.
While the mooted Vodafone/Three merger has the potential to add meaningful shareholder value, the German and Vantage deals are designed to ease Vodafone’s ongoing leverage issue—with debt relief up front paid for with future EBITDA.
Getting leverage under control will be helpful, but the focus should continue to be Vodafone’s operational performance, particularly in Germany, and its ability to deliver EBITDA promises in challenging circumstances.
Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders Analysis, said that the ECJ ruling next year is “going to be absolutely critical for European mergers”, adding that regulators’ view on the Orange-MasMovil deal is “more uncertain than the companies are portraying to the market."
She added “Whether you’ve got three players desperately trying to fill their networks, or four, isn’t that different in terms of competitive intensity."
Gill said "BBC Studios is certainly a very powerful engine that brings money back to the parent company, but it is not a cash cow. Even if its growth has been constant, in production, the profit margins are quite low."
Francois said “Private equity funds, like KKR, seem to have discovered in recent years the value of intellectual property and the relatively predictable income it generates."
The quality of its editorial policy has a lot to do with it. “They have a great flair for investing in blockbuster films. The Mission impossible, for example, will still make money in fifteen years”, notes François Godard. The tremendous success of "Top Gun: Maverick", which at the end of August had accumulated more than 1.4 billion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, provides a recent illustration of this.
