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According to Enders Analysis, even with a high subscription rate comparable to Netflix, revenue generated would fall short by over £1bn compared to the current licence fee.

Gill Hind, chief operating officer and TV director at Enders Analysis, told City A.M. that DCMS will most likely be looking at tweaking the licence fee or exploring a tax-based solution, drawing inspiration from systems evolving in countries like Germany and Finland.

“Whatever change is made,” she said, “it is going to take a huge amount of time to implement because obviously you need to get the buy-in of everyone including politicians in all parties.

“So, I think the first and foremost thing they’ll be looking at is actually what can be done with the current mechanism and how could that potentially be altered in some shape or form,” Hind explained.

In October, despite lighter viewers consuming three times more online content compared to 2022, daily viewing only increased minimally due to low initial engagement, according to Enders Analysis. In contrast, heavy ITV linear viewers increased their online viewing nearly fivefold.

“There is Netflix and then there is sort of everyone else,” says Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis. “Everyone except Netflix is making losses quarter by quarter. While Netflix hasn’t of course yet balanced its billions in losses it is now making profits and will catch that up pretty quickly now.”

“The monetisation strategy of streaming content has been quite simply crazy,” says Harrington. “Viewers have been bingeing content that is now more expensive than ever to create despite the history of TV and film being all about ‘windows’ of commercialising content on different platforms to make them pay over and over again for years. It just hasn’t been profitable.”

Karen Egan, a senior telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, said Lebara would “attract a high [ebitda] multiple” as MVNOs have low levels of capital expenditure and are becoming “very attractive” to network operators because of their subscriber bases.

“I think that multiples could be higher now given the strength of the MVNOs both in terms of growth trajectory and ability to move between network operators,” Egan added.

Karen Egan, a senior telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, said governments were becoming increasingly wary of allowing significant foreign influence over incumbent telecoms operators.

But she said Middle Eastern companies saw a chance to enhance their reputations by being associated with a “reasonably leading-edge, sizeable company” such as Telefónica. The United Arab Emirates group e& already has a stake in Vodafone.

“It’s very difficult to work out whether it’s the format, presenter or both when a new format doesn’t work – TV isn’t as close and confessional as radio, so there isn’t a TV equivalent to Ken Bruce,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “But with Question of Sport there was clearly an audience response to the retooling, including the insulting name change, as the viewing drop over the past two seasons was quite precipitous, even for 2023. It’s not that Paddy McGuinness is a bad presenter, it’s just that he and the other changes chafed too much with the audience’s long-bedded expectations the show. The reasons for the BBC wanting to do this are obvious, but the futility of the attempt was completely predictable.”