James said “They have to agree player wage reductions; that has to occur. But if the agreed temporary wage reductions are not adequate, there could be problems.”

He added “If the reductions aren’t sufficient but they are in other big football clubs and other big leagues in the world, then the only other option to avert bankruptcy for many Premier League clubs will be to sell their players,” 

James said even some rich countries are suffering in this regard. Telefonica Spain has seen a 30% surge in data traffic and Telecom Italia reports a 10% rise. Download speeds in Italy have also declined, according to OpenSignal, a network-analytics firm.

James said "Those data caps were legacy tariffs. Broadly speaking, they are not really a factor in the vast majority of the market at the moment. I don't think they'll be coming back."
 

He added "What broadband operators are trying to do is to have a realistic, proportionate and achievable level of response. The imperative is to keep these networks going so that they can provide resilience to their customers."

The third idea is of Netflix sufficiency, and if that sounds vague it is illustrative of the vague pronouncements of government spokespeople, from Boris Johnson down. As Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, and a host of other industry and academic voices have made clear, the comparison between the BBC and Netflix is spurious. Netflix is a heavily debt-laden commercial enterprise pursuing first-mover advantage. While Netflix excels in certain categories of filmed entertainment and original programme investment, its services come nowhere near the range of the BBC in news, local content, or cultural specificity. Most importantly, Netflix would not have the capacity to offer anything approaching such a range under its current governance and business model.

James said "What has mostly happened so far is an increase in broadband usage during the day. So there are a lot more gigabytes going over the network, but they are doing so when the network wasn't busy, which makes it broadly manageable. I'm fairly confident that providers will be able to deal with this trend."

He added  "Providers have never seen anything like this before. They know how to increase capacity because capacity has been growing 30-40% a year over the past ten years. But growing 30-40% a month will be more challenging."

Tom said “The Simpsons is a more Hulu show than it is a Disney+ show, but they needed that because they needed to grow scale. When it first launched, it was an antidote to Disney, in that it was the first real cartoon hit not explicitly for children."

He added “Netflix is different in that they make something for everybody. Netflix doesn't worry that much about its brand outside of providing entertainment, they're not gatekeepers of some sort of morality or anything like that, which, in the case of Disney, has built up a reputation.”

Douglas warned “If your entire business is sports journalism, this is a challenging period.”

He added The Athletic is not alone. Every media outlet was going to have to “think very creatively” about its sports coverage.

Tom said “The problem with streaming services is that audiences expect every TV show ever made to be available right now, but subscriptions are underpriced. Netflix gets around that by borrowing and Amazon uses it as a loss leader for e-commerce. Disney used to make a lot of money selling shows to other broadcasters, but its businesses with the largest profit margins now are amusement parks, cruises and merchandise. They want to reach massive scale, because if kids watch Frozen 2, they’ll want to go to Disney World and spend hundreds of pounds a day going on the ride or buying the outfits.”

Douglas describes putting so much emphasis on how much Tesco would pay to run ads alongside journalism as “a mad model” compared with making consumers gladly pay for the content itself.

Douglas said “When a lockdown phase is initiated it is unlikely to make much sense for free print media to continue. Any business that is designed for commuters, or at the very least relies on people moving around, will find it very difficult to continue as normal."