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Francois said "For the competition to be interesting for a sufficiently large audience of viewers, there should be teams in at least the five major football countries in Europe."
Julian said the breakaway saga of the last week had thrown "even more uncertainty into the broadcasting landscape."
"The uncertainty generated by the suggestion of the ESL breakaway has caused broadcasters to be a little more concerned about the prospects of a healthy football ecosystem," he told Telegraph Sport. "So for the upcoming Premier League rights auction, in particular, I think the broadcasters are going to be slightly more cautious than they would have been otherwise had this not happened."
That caution, he says, is most likely to manifest in seeking reassurances, rather than in negotiating prices down. "It probably doesn't do too much to further devalue any values so long as they can be sure of what they are getting,"
Tom said “More people came on board as there was nothing else to do. Churn – people dropping their subscription – is usually between 5-7 per cent but that went way down. People who were on the fence about Netflix came forward, so in effect the new subscribers they would normally expect this year came on board early. Having said that, it doesn’t mean there aren’t risks Netflix faces.”
He added “TV at the upper end is moving in the direction of cinema. There are so many shows people can’t watch them all. Netflix has 200 million subs which means time, say, three people they can push shows to 600 million. But the new Star Wars show… people will seek that out. Disney is launching Star Wars spin offs. Amazon has Lord of the Rings. Netflix needs IP.”
Subscriber growth is down but the benefits from COVID-19 have been banked and are enduring. The pandemic pulled forward new subscribers, delayed churn and higher engagement allowed price rises to be pushed through—ARPU in US/Canada, for example has now risen 74 cents in one quarter (to $14.25).
Is the Netflix narrative beginning to change from subscriber adds to engagement? As markets mature the obvious metric that could drive a corporate narrative is engagement, which is higher on Netflix than competitors and growing.
Netflix still lacks tentpole IP in a competitive space. However, the new deal with Sony conceivably gives Netflix access to IP such as Spider-Man, Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, Jumanji and Venom.
Julian said We don't really think it's a sound strategy to pursue. It's mainly because of the enormous amounts of money that the clubs already get from broadcast partners — logistically, it would be a lot more difficult, because every club would need to have their own streaming service. Live television is an expensive business."
Europe’s larger MNOs are falling over each other to demonstrate support for OpenRAN, which has become a primarily operator-driven standards initiative, with governments also firmly behind it.
This is driven by a desire to improve equipment interoperability from the current de facto monolithic standards, improve supplier diversity, and ultimately drive down cost.
While some movement towards interoperability is perhaps overdue, OpenRAN is not a panacea, and some trade-offs between price, performance, supplier diversity and reliability have to be accepted.
Mobile revenue growth improved slightly to -3% this quarter, primarily thanks to a weakening in the drag from the loss of roaming.
European MNOs are guiding to improving trends in 2021—broadly stable revenues and EBITDA vs declines of 5-7% in 2020. This bodes well for guidance from the UK players around mid-May.
However, the outlook is far from rosy, with Q1 2021 still very challenging ahead of an annualisation of the pandemic drags from the June quarter. Growth prospects remain contingent on the resumption of travel and the economic climate.
Francois said he could not see the clubs being expelled from domestic leagues because it would “hurt everybody” involved.
He added “We are in a hypothetical scenario of these clubs being expelled – I can’t see this happening because it will hurt everybody. But if this were to happen of course the broadcasters would come and say ‘we will pay less, you changed the product so we want to review the price."
“I don’t see how this new league would increase the pot, so at best you would capture money that’s going to the Champions League and possibly there would be a transfer of spending by broadcasters from a national leagues to this new league.”
Francois said Several of the Super League’s founders have American owners, who look at the European system and say, “Why this insecurity? In America we don’t have that."