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."

Alice Enders, the director of research at Enders Analysis, said: “The mega-trend in consumer music spend is not recorded streaming services but the experience of live music, which super-fan clusters especially will pay a lot for. “Oasis have been completely off both the recorded music and live music scenes, and reforming will drive ticket sales as well as streaming of their songs.”

James Barford, director of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said fundraising had “slowed to a trickle in 2024” and that most altnets had been “struggling with low take-up and high operating losses”.

However, the head of television at Enders Analysis, Tom Harrington, thinks the current row is unlikely to damage Strictly’s global appeal. “I don’t think anyone in Belgium or wherever is reading the press here and thinking: ‘I’m less likely to watch the Belgian version.’ It’s very well insulated. Other than maybe the problems that they’ve allegedly had in the UK could be happening somewhere else.” Harrington said that selling formats is estimated to make up about 20% of BBC Studios’ revenues but that the big formats are “very, very high margin … and incredibly lucrative”, which helps to explain Strictly’s importance to the BBC at a time when it is facing cuts because fewer people are paying the licence fee and, the BBC argues, 14 years of funding cuts by Conservative-led governments have reduced its budget by 30% in real terms.

“The decline in the last quarter is not particularly worse than previous periods but the writedown and the future impact of losing NBA games has crystallised the decline in the eyes of the investors, hence the reaction,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “The core problem Zaslav has which, say, Disney doesn’t, is that the company doesn’t really have truly mass-market content, which is what you need for success in streaming – and you need to have success in streaming to balance the decline in linear.”

Head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, Karen Egan, said the current take up rate “will certainly not justify the investment made in the company thus far.” Egan said the deal could “massively improve” Cityfibre’s prospects, especially in rural areas where Openreach is unlikely to venture anytime soon.

A report by Enders Analysis earlier this year titled “UK Altnets: The beginning of the end?”, captured the situation well. This week’s agreement between CityFibre and my employer, Sky, will – as well as hurting BT’s Openreach arm – accelerate the impetus to consolidate into fewer than a handful of players.