Alice pointed out the symbiotic relationship between the success of streaming platforms and catalogue investments: “There is no question that the rise of music rights is led by the rise in streaming. Streaming has also increased as more people are staying at home in the pandemic to consume music.”

She added that it is “all about scale”, and trying to acquire as many rights as possible, especially ‘evergreen’ records. Evergreen tracks would be older music from the 60s,70s, and 80s that is already valuable and popular.

Francois said “We’ve been through four or five years when all the new money [in Europe] was coming from the streamers." he adds that sometimes the streamers “have been pretty generous,” prompting costs of talent, crew and facilities to rise in some countries.

“But this is going to stop at some point. The streamers are starting to become more stingy; maybe some of them are going to start cutting back.” And, rather than high-end shows like Netflix’s “The Crown,” they are starting to spread their resources widely, spending more on documentaries and non-scripted content, which is cheaper to produce.

Alice said “The Buzzfeed IPO was unsurprisingly disappointing for the many other advertising-reliant digital native media companies watching. It wasn’t too long ago when these companies were seen spuriously labelled ‘tech’ rather than ‘media’ businesses and the investments poured in. Yet when they failed to live up to the hype, the money dried up.”

Douglas said the pressures were so acute that some companies were worried they would be unable to obtain enough newsprint to meet their needs, although he suspected that the “big fear about availability” had recently subsided.

Karen said the risk for Vodafone and all telcos is that they find their network equipment is in the wrong places. She said this is a “fairly immediate issue” that is impacting the current cycle of network planning.

“They’ve invested a huge amount to get as much capacity as they can into city centres, especially with 5G. They may now find that they didn’t need to invest so much there, and that they’ll come up against capacity issues in suburbs and rural areas to a much greater extent than expected, requiring additional investment."

Alice said "Because the business is still not profitable but trying to get as close to breakeven as possible, the amount of layoffs and cost cutting has been very drastic. That does have a knock-on effect. Ultimately, the quality will decline by having a smaller newsroom."

She added There are "two competing forces at play" with the SPAC deal. "Yes, the future for BuzzFeed is a consolidation play, but it's very heavily reliant on advertising. And that's very reliant on market conditions. The first thing to be cut is digital advertising."

Francois said “Discovery, about to merge with Warner, is one of the most powerful content operators in the world, so if it were to increase substantially its commitment to the UK sports TV market, it would look like a long-term, credible commitment. By contrast DAZN’s prospects are more fuzzy."

While Francois predicts the potential joint venture would not push sports rights costs up, owing to Eurosport and JV’s historically cautious approach to rights, he argues that the deal would “confirm the fragmentation trend where consumers need to subscribe to a range of services to watch their favourite sports – Sky, BT Sport, Amazon, Eurosport.”

“It rises the value of aggregation by operators likes Sky or Virgin, telling viewers “you find everything here in one place."

Claire said “It started a generation ago." She believes that the prime mover of Rothermere’s strategy is the man who has been the company’s CEO since 2016, Paul Zwillenberg. Rothermere first met Zwillenberg at Duke University, where they were both students in the 1980s.

Abi said that the move is “no surprise. It is nudging the institutional investors.”

Julian said “For advertisers, reaching a mass audience simultaneously is key, which linear TV is set up perfectly to do”. He cited the popularity of shows like Strictly Come Dancing and the Great British Bake Off as signalling the ongoing relevance of  traditional broadcast for adverts."