“Both have serious issues to address with PS5 having sold less than PS4, and the studios team unable to derive benefits from acquisitions such as Bungie, or deliver successful live service titles,” said Gareth Sutcliffe, head of gaming at research firm Enders Analysis.

Hamish Low, an analyst at research firm Enders Analysis, told Business Insider that the reaction to the chip stock sell-off seems "quite overblown" as "being able to use compute much more efficiently," a key claim of DeepSeek's R1 release, "is by no means bad for compute demand."

Enders Analysis' Low made a similar point, telling BI that "DeepSeek is maybe just acting as a trigger point here for much broader investor unease around the returns on Big Tech AI capex and Nvidia's continued rise."

The conversations usually don’t involve much pushback. Podcasters aren’t held to the same standards of accuracy as the traditional press, so there’s little emphasis on fact-checking. “It turns out a huge proportion of younger demographics just don’t care about any of that”, says Douglas McCabe, CEO at Enders Analysis. “The feeling is: ‘I’m getting the authentic voice, and I’m not subject to whatever the agenda of the editorial newsroom is’,” he says.

It’s unclear where the balance between old and new media will resettle. “I can’t see [traditional media] having the same scale of influence and commercial heft in the marketplace in the next five years that they had five or 10 years ago”, says McCabe. “I don’t think that’s controversial. It’s inevitable”.

Karen Egan, at Enders Analysis, said BT's main focus would be how to recover the vast amounts of cash it has been spending on an ambitious drive to roll out fibre broadband internet across the UK.

'It needs to press ahead with that,' Egan said, adding that the group would want to avoid any 'nasty surprises' arising out of its international BT Global division. Egan agreed Bharti was 'very supportive' of the current strategy and that the Indian giant would likely be 'encouraging the company to digitalise faster'.

Analyst Francois Godard at Enders Analysis said it had been impossible to split the group at the optimum point in the cycle for all of the companies, and with its South Africa deal yet to close, Canal+ had suffered.

"Now they have to take their time to explain their business," he said, referring to Canal+.

The market would have a clearer view in the second half of 2025 after a few quarters of results, he said.

An investor like Saudi Arabia is unlike most market participants, said Gill Hind, director of TV at Enders Analysis, a research firm focusing on the media, entertainment and telecoms sectors. For the kingdom, financial success matters less than the increased visibility for the sports properties it owns, including its top soccer league.

“It’s a very different proposition for the Saudis,” Ms. Hind said. “They’re doing it for different reasons than would be typical for other investors.”

Finally there is the “market failure” model, where the corporation provides only what its commercial competitors do not do sufficiently, such as news and high-brow culture coverage. The problem is that if the BBC is not serving a mass audience it risks swiftly losing public backing. Claire Enders, a media analyst and founder of Enders Analysis, says that every time the corporation tries to scrap a service, it is met with a furore. “They get hundreds of thousands of responses saying. ‘Don’t touch a hair on the head of 6 Music.’”

Subscribers to streaming platforms get access to all of the content on them so it isn't possible to attribute revenue to specific shows. In turn, it isn't possible to tell whether they made a profit or a loss. As Tom Harrington of media consultants Enders Analysis explained, "given the structure of the streaming model it is almost impossible to robustly attribute profitability to any single piece of content."

In one sense, this is all small change to Apple which – as of March 2024 – was the world’s seventh largest company by revenue, earning $97 billion in income from a turnover of $383 billion. The company’s problem, according to Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis, is that growth over the last couple of decades has come through selling iPhones at a high price to the world’s wealthy.

“Apple TV+ is never going to be a particularly broad service given the reverence that has to be shown to the Apple brand, but currently it appeals to so few,” Harrington points out. “This has caused it to then undermine its own value with free offers and deals. The future is difficult to map due to the reluctance of management to ever explain what the actual point of the service is – Tim Cook has mentioned in the past that content decisions are not ‘purely financial’, for example – and aggregating its metrics with other Apple subscriptions.”

“The loss of 250,000 subscribers in the wake of The Post’s non-endorsement has highlighted the fragilities in the subscription model,” said Enders Analysis senior research analyst Abi Watson. “Acting in ways contra to a publisher’s perceived values—Democracy dies in darkness, etc—will turn off subscribers because it’s effectively acting against their own personal values.”