Claire said “Without the debate on privatisation, it would have been impossible for those 60,000 organisations to make their views known.”

She explained that by reopening discussion it was actually “strengthening the remit for Channel 4”, which could lead to a codification of its essential functions, like reinvesting back into talent. This could then be passed on to a buyer, whoever that may be.

Gill said the ad market has enjoyed “phenomenal growth” in recent months and shows no signs of slowing over Christmas.

She added that traditional broadcasters have the opportunity to put on “big shows that appeal across age groups."

“The TV programme schedule is probably better at achieving that than a show on Netflix or Amazon, where it’s targeted more at one demographic or another."

Claire said “They have always been a deterrent, a very serious media company that no one wants to piss off. They aren’t your average garden variety deterrent, they are a big monster deterrent.”

She added “It is not viewed as a badly run business, it is efficiently and well run. Every part of their business is doing extraordinarily well at this time. A couple of exceptional years and people will see the core of the business is not in this secular decline. ITV is not getting the credit it should, but it will do.”

Abi said some investors were also reluctant that they could be “losing out” on any upside of online growth in titles like the Daily Mail if the group went private. “What this ignores is how many more online users would be required to fully replace declining print revenues and the scale of investment needed to transition the print readers of the Daily Mail to an online membership model of some kind."

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."