Tom Harrington, of Enders, says that the company’s speed is also a crucial factor. Show trailers start playing in seconds and lags are rare.

“The user experience is probably undervalued in its contribution to Netflix’s success,” Harrington says. “For a lean-back medium like TV, any added aggravation raises the bar of how good your content has to be to make the journey worthwhile.

“There’s an alchemy of a number of things that Netflix does better than anyone else.”

 

Hamish Low, an analyst at research firm Enders Analysis, told Business Insider that the reaction to the chip stock sell-off seems "quite overblown" as "being able to use compute much more efficiently," a key claim of DeepSeek's R1 release, "is by no means bad for compute demand."

Enders Analysis' Low made a similar point, telling BI that "DeepSeek is maybe just acting as a trigger point here for much broader investor unease around the returns on Big Tech AI capex and Nvidia's continued rise."

The conversations usually don’t involve much pushback. Podcasters aren’t held to the same standards of accuracy as the traditional press, so there’s little emphasis on fact-checking. “It turns out a huge proportion of younger demographics just don’t care about any of that”, says Douglas McCabe, CEO at Enders Analysis. “The feeling is: ‘I’m getting the authentic voice, and I’m not subject to whatever the agenda of the editorial newsroom is’,” he says.

It’s unclear where the balance between old and new media will resettle. “I can’t see [traditional media] having the same scale of influence and commercial heft in the marketplace in the next five years that they had five or 10 years ago”, says McCabe. “I don’t think that’s controversial. It’s inevitable”.

Karen Egan, at Enders Analysis, said BT's main focus would be how to recover the vast amounts of cash it has been spending on an ambitious drive to roll out fibre broadband internet across the UK.

'It needs to press ahead with that,' Egan said, adding that the group would want to avoid any 'nasty surprises' arising out of its international BT Global division. Egan agreed Bharti was 'very supportive' of the current strategy and that the Indian giant would likely be 'encouraging the company to digitalise faster'.

Analyst Francois Godard at Enders Analysis said it had been impossible to split the group at the optimum point in the cycle for all of the companies, and with its South Africa deal yet to close, Canal+ had suffered.

"Now they have to take their time to explain their business," he said, referring to Canal+.

The market would have a clearer view in the second half of 2025 after a few quarters of results, he said.

An investor like Saudi Arabia is unlike most market participants, said Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis, a research firm focusing on the media, entertainment and telecoms sectors. For the kingdom, financial success matters less than the increased visibility for the sports properties it owns, including its top soccer league.

“It’s a very different proposition for the Saudis,” Ms. Hind said. “They’re doing it for different reasons than would be typical for other investors.”

Finally there is the “market failure” model, where the corporation provides only what its commercial competitors do not do sufficiently, such as news and high-brow culture coverage. The problem is that if the BBC is not serving a mass audience it risks swiftly losing public backing. Claire Enders, a media analyst and founder of Enders Analysis, says that every time the corporation tries to scrap a service, it is met with a furore. “They get hundreds of thousands of responses saying. ‘Don’t touch a hair on the head of 6 Music.’”

Subscribers to streaming platforms get access to all of the content on them so it isn't possible to attribute revenue to specific shows. In turn, it isn't possible to tell whether they made a profit or a loss. As Tom Harrington of media consultants Enders Analysis explained, "given the structure of the streaming model it is almost impossible to robustly attribute profitability to any single piece of content."