“An increase of 25% would be a huge success in a market where domestic leagues have been struggling to generate even low one-figure percentage increases,” said François Godard, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.
The French group may even have managed to lower the price, which had reached €480 million for the current cycle. "Maxime Saada [the head of Canal+, editor's note] may have been bluffing when he said he was ready to lose the exclusive rights to the competition," analyzes François Godard, a sports rights specialist at Enders Analysis.
“For current subscribers, it’s not a disaster; they would have continued to get the majority of the matches. For new subscribers, it’s more difficult to recruit them,” explains François Godard. “It becomes confusing when several broadcasters are advertising the same competition.”
"The cited £2bn price tag sounds like an ask from the sellers rather than something that’s likely to be paid in anything like hard currency (equivalent to £700-900 per home passed depending on whether it includes Netomnia’s net debt)
We would be surprised if anyone pays more than £500 per home passed in cash. Nexfibre can build new fibre for that price, and overlay it’s cable network for £100 per home passed. With 50%+ overlap between Netomnia and Virgin Media O2/nexfibre, that points to a reasonable price of <£300 per home passed, or an overall price tag of less than £1bn
Enders Analysis has estimated that an ITV-Sky sales tie-up would hold just over 30% of the UK video ad market.
Overall, it calculated that tech giants Google, Meta and Amazon account for 55% of the total UK ad market but, narrowed down to just video, Sky Media and ITV Media would hold just over 30%, a share that would be “very likely to decline over time”.
A key test in this investigation, Enders projected, would be convincing the CMA that the relevant ad market in which ITV and Sky competes is broader than just the UK broadcasters.
It added: “It would be a missed opportunity for the CMA not to reconsider what the definition of the relevant advertising market may be, and whether some or all of advertising in other video should be included.
“National broadcasters must grow in order to compete against the global tech streamers, including YouTube.”
Saturday’s leader in the Telegraph op-ed pages called for a fast sale without a reserve price to expedite the process – a sharp contrast with its recent demands for thorough investigation and regulatory examination of the RedBird bid. “Telegraph Media Group’s 2024 performance lands where you might expect a business trapped in a two-year ownership freeze,” said Abi Watson at Enders Analysis. “Its topline was essentially flat - up 1% to £279m - with operating profit broadly unchanged. The deeper issue is structural. TMG still derives 55% of revenue from print, or closer to 60% if you strip out ‘other revenues’ like platform licensing and eCommerce. Digital subscriptions and digital advertising together account for around 40% of core revenues, but they are still not scaling fast enough to offset print erosion - not exactly what any bidder would want to see in a legacy-to-digital transition story.”
“It is so difficult to prove defamation in the US, and for a program that Americans have not seen,” said Claire Enders, a media analyst and founder of Enders Analysis. “There is no basis for the lawsuit, and there would be no basis for a settlement.”
Expanded capabilities notwithstanding, Netflix will still need to expand its controller offerings beyond mobile devices to include more traditional gaming controllers if it wants to grow its portfolio beyond party games, according to Gareth Sutcliffe, the head analyst covering the games industry for the market research service Enders Analysis.
“Supporting kids’ gaming specifically, which they’ve publicly stated is a priority, clearly needs a non-mobile-phone controller option,” Sutcliffe said in an interview with GamesBeat. “A controller reference design that OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] support would begin a ramp to a richer game service, increased advertising TAM [total addressable market], and possible games subscription tier.”
“If there are better services available elsewhere and there is more innovation and there is more choice, then consumers are going to move in that direction, even if that includes piracy,” says Gareth Sutcliffe, from tech researchers Enders Analysis. He says the situation has “become very acute” and had “developed mostly for the worse over the last few years”.
So what, if anything, can solve the issue?
“Innovation is a great response to piracy,” says Sutcliffe. “It addresses the fact that people not only want access, but they may actually want something different because they are moving faster than broadcasters or content owners are moving themselves.”
Gareth Sutcliffe is a leading tech researcher from Enders Analysis, who speaks on a range of topics in the episode, including the role of the Fire TV Stick device. He says that the previous — and still widely used — device made by Amazon “enables piracy” and that it’s “a broadly risky device for consumer safety”.
Sutcliffe says it “provides a very easy path for malware to enter into a home-computing environment”, there were “policies around developing apps for that device that Amazon took a certain position on and broadly got wrong” as they had made “an open computing device” that was a playground for “a whole world of nefarious actors”.
Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, said a new leader should be appointed as soon as possible to "restore the trust there has to be in the BBC for it to survive the charter".