Karen said "I think Nick Read sounds too confident with regard to the UK. There is a bit more acknowledgement to balance investment and returns, but I think that the appetite for consolidation is still quite weak.

"It is hard to think how Three UK is going to thrive or even survive without such a deal, but I don't think it is there for the taking in any stretch of the imagination."

Karen believes Vodafone's heavy debts are a key reason that it is eyeing merger opportunities for Vantage Towers, the mobile masts operator that was carved out of the business in a move that could pave the way for Vodafone to sell down its 82pc stake.

James said "[Street Hubs] used to be in BT's ventures division. And it is still a venture today. It is unclear whether the business model is working or not." 

Gareth predicted today the Weta Digital sale will result in Wellington-based operations - particularly research and development - to be "ultimately hollowed out and moved to North America."

Douglas said “We’re all bombarded with information, and a weekly digest just seems to make an awful lot of sense."

“This is a very resilient sector,” he added, drawing a comparison with other genres that “are all but disappearing”, such as celebrity gossip and men’s interest.

Douglas said “The Sun is a challenged business and the company doesn’t yet have its arms around what to do with it strategically. The brand’s confidence has been hit for sure, but it remains relevant and there are always opportunities: what might it merge with or acquire? The Sun can be a huge network play."

He added “News UK is building an overall scale platform; ‘We aren’t just newspapers, we are a conglomerate’. You need to innovate to fly and you can’t criticise them for experimenting and looking at different models. News Corporation has always had a swagger, an extraordinary confidence, but in recent times I’m not sure News UK has quite had it. This is about getting that swagger back.”

Douglas said they will need to do further restructuring involving axing titles and layoffs. Iwan Le Moine of emge, a British paper-industry consultancy, expects a big increase in 2022 of the number of papers that shut compared with a typical year. That will lower demand and nudge the market back towards equilibrium.But newspapers will have more hard conversations about paper, full stop.

Karen said “I think some investors have become confused with the alt-nets. They are thinking ‘big investment and secure returns. So far, they have only seen big investments and forgotten about the returns."

“The overbuild issue [from Openreach and Virgin Media O2] is something the [alt-nets] would like to skirt over."

Douglas said “It’s all about the market business now."

Douglas said “One of the effects of the pandemic is that it’s accelerated structural change that’s been going on for some time. The transition from physical retail to online retail, the transition of offline media to online media... all of those structural changes were rapidly accelerated. In actual fact, about five years of change – from the perspective of business planning – was probably in effect executed overnight due to the pandemic."

He added “I think that had an upside effect. I think it gave some people confidence in the fundamentals of media businesses in a way that they were still worried about them at the end of 2019 and early 2020. Which is to say that the transition was expected to take a long time, and it was to be very expensive."