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Joseph said “The D2C market is set to consolidate, as the many, many businesses with unsustainable unit economics are exposed by a downturn. Add to that the fact that targeting and attribution are getting harder, due to technical and legal restrictions piling up.”
Abi described the BBC’s results as “really good” but added that they followed a year full of lockdowns, meaning that a production rebound and pent-up advertising demand were likely to have helped.
WBD has “figured out that, actually, the only axis they need to pay attention to, given the importance of these businesses and their core markets, is — No. 1 — the U.S., then the U.K., Germany and France,” says Claire Enders, founder of leading London-based media consultancy Enders Analysis.
“There isn’t any other place they need to play,” she adds. This axis “drives their business to an extraordinary extent, and they can have much thinner services elsewhere. It’s absolutely the right strategy.”
She added “All that mystery of, ‘Are HBO and Sky going to sign a new deal?’ ‘Is pay TV going to die in Europe?’ Well, that question is over. There isn’t going to be the death of pay TV. These companies are going to be relicensing material that their aged 50-something audiences are really going to enjoy.”
With the cost-of-living crisis expected to worsen over the coming months, the telecoms operators must walk a fine line—support customers but protect their financial performance in the face of a likely recession and rising costs.
We are likely to see weakness on the B2B side and consumers will look for ways to reduce out-of-bundle spend, seek retention discounts and spin down to lower speed tiers and data bundles, but we expect that dropping services completely will hold limited appeal.
Proactive retention activity and promotional pricing is likely to pay off more than slashing headline prices, and will help to avoid a damaging price war—a far bigger risk to their revenues than spin-down.
Joseph said Twitter has a good chance of forcing Musk to pay what now looks like a very high price for the company because “most people don’t come to business and legal negotiations with the bad faith and poor behaviour that Musk has displayed”. “That gives Twitter good leverage to get a renegotiated deal that avoids a full court battle: either a slightly reduced purchase price, or a more substantial damages payment than the $1 billion."
The 'enterprise metaverse' is best described as the next generation of communications, productivity, and collaboration tools—with VR/AR the centerpiece of the experience. Big tech is investing billions to bring it to market quickly
Quest 2 VR headsets by Meta have changed the cost equation for VR deployment in enterprise—low-cost headsets already have enterprise demand outstripping supply globally
Microsoft and Meta are closely aligned and co-operating, but Meta has its sights on its own high-value commercial customers and can expect incumbents to fight to retain them
Francois said “In the main markets of North America and Europe, it’s not about growing the subscriber base for Netflix, but keeping it and raising prices. Sport is a very good tool against [losing subscribers] because you have those in the fanbase that won’t churn because a season is over six months, or four months, and matches are shown every week."
“The question is does Netflix want to remain one streaming option among many? Or do they want to be a full alternative to traditional TV that would encourage consumers in Europe to forget about Sky? If you want to do that, you need sport. While not cheap, sport means you can charge a higher subscription fee.”
Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis, has told TVBEurope she expects the government’s plan to sell off Channel 4 to move to the backburner following Boris Johnson’s resignation as UK prime minister.
She adds that the idea of privatising the broadcaster doesn’t have wider support among MPs, while over 96 per cent of the 55,737 organisations and individuals who responded to the government’s consultation on the future of Channel 4 said they did not support the privatisation of the broadcaster.
Hind says she doesn’t think privatisation will be a priority for either the new prime minister or culture secretary. “That’s not to say it won’t rear its head, because during Channel 4’s almost 40 years on air it’s always does periodically.”
Douglas said “The problem is that some investors think that content businesses are now tech businesses. So they want to see the scale of a tech business too. Journalism businesses don’t “scale” like tech platforms: they are fundamentally ‘people businesses’"