Karen said Three “seems to be between a rock and a hard place — too small scale to earn a decent return and with a very challenging trajectory towards achieving the scale it needs to improve those returns."

James said “The most polite way of putting it is to say that the comments are slightly tenuous."

Alice said “That’s why the rebrand could be so important. They can say, ‘We have all of these great initiatives that we’re launching, but we need funding, and part of that funding comes from you, our members. Come join us in this mission.'”

Francois said “DAZN appears to be trying to double down on Italy in the prospect of their expected IPO. Sky is probably more relaxed than in the past about holding rights.”

Gill believes the £1.5bn target is bold, but added: “While it is notoriously difficult to make money out of kids programming, if the BBC happens to devise the next Peppa Pig, the return from merchandise could be huge."

She added “The BBC has a very strong brand globally, and if it could commercialise its audio output and/or news via a subscription service outside the UK there is potentially a large market. You could see people paying a few pounds a month to have access to Radio 4, for example, via BBC Sounds.”

Gill said GB News will "play impartiality in a different way." She predicts some shows may skew left, while others hew right, evening out the appearance of bias across the network. But all programs, she predicts, will revolve around opinionated individual commentators — a different dynamic on British television.

She added "For a new channel launching into this market that is not backed by an ITV, or a BBC or a Sky — how are you going to get an audience in the first place? That's going to prove incredibly difficult."

Karen said: “While the results of this auction is a very positive upside surprise for the operators — almost all of whom have something of a cash crisis going on — the exchequer will be disappointed that the proceeds are around half those that they might have expected.”

Karen said: "The cash-strapped operators have little appetite for driving up their spectrum bills particularly given the significant costs to them of the Huawei ban and ongoing revenue declines in the sector in spite of booming volume growth."

Douglas says News Corp’s deals were “tactical victories” and it had done “an impressive job of keeping this issue front of people’s minds. But the strategic question remains in place. How to improve the incentives for independent, quality news origination in the digital age, assuming we all agree that that plays a critical role in a healthy democracy.” 

He added “We hope the UK’s digital markets unit will deal with such strategic questions – designing for new definitions, norms, practices and market outcomes – regarding origination, curation and content distribution, rather than carving out a series of time-stamped deals.”