Enders Analysis, a company regarded as the gold standard for media research, put it in a recent report: “There is still a widespread misconception that sports viewing has declined at the same pace as the rest of broadcast TV due to increased competition, the high price of pay TV and the supposed short attention spans of the social media generation. In fact, sports viewing has been the most resilient component of broadcast TV.” As Enders points out, it’s not just the big-ticket items on network TV which are flying either. In fact, young viewers now consume nearly half of their sports through Sky, “dwarfing the combined efforts of the BBC and ITV, which refutes the widely held view that young people don’t watch sport behind a paywall”, while TNT Sports has also seen its audience share rise. That is noteworthy, given price rises and piracy concerns due to firesticks. And there is a final surprise in the Enders report.

Alice Enders, at Enders Analysis, said the fact that English is such a global language will always keep the UK on the front foot. She added: ‘There is also a pool of educated young people who have all the right skillsets.’ But Enders emphasised that the data is more complicated than it first appears as the Office for National Statistics does not provide a detailed breakdown. As well as direct ad sales, it includes conferences and events, making it more difficult to gauge the impact of specific parts of the industry.

Douglas McCabe, the chief executive at Enders Analysis, points to the success enjoyed by the owner of the Daily Mail’s investment in Zoopla, and the Guardian’s former ownership of AutoTrader. “It is the type of diversification that Rupert has always been interested in,” said McCabe “He tried to set up the first pan-newspaper owner online classified service. The classified market in general is one newspaper owners feel comfortable with; there is a heritage and history to this, and businesses here such as Daily Mail & General Trust and the Guardian have done well out of it. Lachlan sniffs an opportunity here.”

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said: “It has been a tough few years for the company with escalating competitive pressure from alt nets in particular and an operationally complex move to full-fibre. “There are, however, reasons to believe that the threat from the alt nets will wane, and the most challenging fibre complexities will soon be behind them.”

The likes of Gardeners’ World, DIY programmes and films about urgent domestic issues and obscure parts of the country would be threatened if the broadcaster were forced to implement a Netflix-style paywall for the next charter period from 2027, according to Enders Analysis. It said: “A shift to a subscription-funded BBC would undermine a crucial tenet of its public service mission by narrowing access. This would severely reduce the impact of the BBC’s public service content, which has wide reach across society.

A study conducted in the United Kingdom by the firm Enders illustrates how the Google-owned video giant is inspired by (and sometimes feeds on) the content of the channels. "In the past, television and YouTube content were polar opposites," the report says. This is changing, with more and more overlap in the offers." Three figures show the growing weight of YouTube on the small screen. As the experts at Enders point out, the YouTube model is still struggling to become the preferred distribution channel for programs that are expensive to produce. On YouTube, "you need a huge volume of videos viewed to break even," the authors of the study point out. Most YouTubers have other sources of income besides advertising revenue."

Karen Egan, analyst at Enders Analysis, said the latest stake-building comes as Slim cashes in on 'recent weakness' in BT's share price – seeing it as a 'buying opportunity'. The deal is a setback for BT, the country's largest broadband and mobile operator, whose Openreach network is also used by Sky to provide broadband. Because of this, Egan said: 'I don't think that Slim will be seeking to take control at any point, but sees the investment case in the shares.'

“It’s a tough market for viewing and monetisation which means everyone wants to derisk, so programming shifts towards those things and people already known to be popular,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “This makes things very difficult for smaller production companies but also makes the output very safe and derivative – think Jamie Oliver doing an air fryer show on Channel 4.” For the viewer, says Harrington, this means more of the same only more so. “Non-objective celeb docs is part of a wider embrace of branded content on TV,” he explains. “Brand-funded entertainment is hardly new but getting advertisers to invest in programming in a more holistic way is now seen by some as a bit of a panacea for TV. A celeb producing and probably partly deficit funding a series featuring themselves is no different from a brand investing in a drama that mythologies its origins or a cooking show funded by M&S about M&S.

Gareth Sutcliffe, from Enders Analysis, told Sky News the game "ultimately reflects a decision Disney took some years ago to get out of the games business, now the highest growth entertainment sector globally, and to rely exclusively on third parties such as Ubisoft to deliver titles with Disney's most valuable and treasured IP. "In this case you end up with a highly-anticipated open world game, but no tie-in with the wider franchise, no series or film release, or remotely equivalent marketing push. "It reinforces the view that Disney is out of position on games, and sees them as an afterthought, which doesn't build confidence for the pending Fortnite partnership with Epic."

Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at research firm Enders Analysis, told BI that technical issues will prove challenging for a full-scale robotaxi rollout. Teasdale added: "The problem for Uber is that fully replacing drivers with robots is really, really difficult. Progress on full autonomy has lagged all but the most pessimistic projections of seven or eight years ago."