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Alice said “The Buzzfeed IPO was unsurprisingly disappointing for the many other advertising-reliant digital native media companies watching. It wasn’t too long ago when these companies were seen spuriously labelled ‘tech’ rather than ‘media’ businesses and the investments poured in. Yet when they failed to live up to the hype, the money dried up.”
Douglas said the pressures were so acute that some companies were worried they would be unable to obtain enough newsprint to meet their needs, although he suspected that the “big fear about availability” had recently subsided.
Podcasts are a small but growing medium, and global streamers and domestic audio players alike are investing heavily in podcast content, distribution and advertising technology.
The broadening choice and diversity of podcasts available has put discoverability, exclusives and personalisation at the heart of the race to become the number one destination for audio.
While the UK currently lags other markets in terms of advertising and monetisation, increasing financial viability coupled with
healthy listener demand suggests a bright future for the UK podcasting sector.
Karen said the risk for Vodafone and all telcos is that they find their network equipment is in the wrong places. She said this is a “fairly immediate issue” that is impacting the current cycle of network planning.
“They’ve invested a huge amount to get as much capacity as they can into city centres, especially with 5G. They may now find that they didn’t need to invest so much there, and that they’ll come up against capacity issues in suburbs and rural areas to a much greater extent than expected, requiring additional investment."
BT is in rude financial health, with strong short- and longer-term prospects arising from inflation-linked price rises next year and the FTTP investment J-curve in the years ahead.
BT’s traditional investors are however understandably sceptical, leading to interest from non-traditional investors and in alternative structures.
Changing the ownership and/or structure of BT involves significant operational, financial, political and pension fund-related issues, making a change of ownership in whole or part no easy panacea.
The boost from annualising the COVID-19 hit dissipated this quarter with service revenues flat-lining at –2.5%. The year-on-year mobility boost weakened and pandemic upsides of lower churn, cost savings and B2B demand unwound.
Q4 looks mixed with an improving year-on-year mobility boost but further unwinding of some pandemic upsides. Spring 2022 has the potential to be the long-awaited panacea with price rises of up to 8% and the prospect of renewed roaming revenues.
The operators continue to seek sources of market repair through price rises (to compensate for regulatory intervention elsewhere) and consolidation—but with little visible support from policymakers as yet.
Alice said "Because the business is still not profitable but trying to get as close to breakeven as possible, the amount of layoffs and cost cutting has been very drastic. That does have a knock-on effect. Ultimately, the quality will decline by having a smaller newsroom."
She added There are "two competing forces at play" with the SPAC deal. "Yes, the future for BuzzFeed is a consolidation play, but it's very heavily reliant on advertising. And that's very reliant on market conditions. The first thing to be cut is digital advertising."
Francois said “Discovery, about to merge with Warner, is one of the most powerful content operators in the world, so if it were to increase substantially its commitment to the UK sports TV market, it would look like a long-term, credible commitment. By contrast DAZN’s prospects are more fuzzy."
While Francois predicts the potential joint venture would not push sports rights costs up, owing to Eurosport and JV’s historically cautious approach to rights, he argues that the deal would “confirm the fragmentation trend where consumers need to subscribe to a range of services to watch their favourite sports – Sky, BT Sport, Amazon, Eurosport.”
“It rises the value of aggregation by operators likes Sky or Virgin, telling viewers “you find everything here in one place."
Claire said “It started a generation ago." She believes that the prime mover of Rothermere’s strategy is the man who has been the company’s CEO since 2016, Paul Zwillenberg. Rothermere first met Zwillenberg at Duke University, where they were both students in the 1980s.