“Sky was always going to be looking for a stringent and long-term wholesale access arrangement as it will be many years before its agreement with O2 expires, and Sky would like to be able to secure even better terms when it does”, said Karen

“ Our view is that the merger will be good for MVNOs as Three has not really been a serious network of consideration for big MVNO moves, so its loss will not impact them. What does matter in terms of MVNOs getting good wholesale rates is the amount of capacity in the market and that will increase by 30% on the basis of our estimates, putting downward pressure on wholesale rates. ”

"Murdoch was immeasurably influential during many decades and in many countries, often through quiet phone calls proffering advice, rather than obvious editorial positions, although of course there were many of those too.”

“From a monetisation angle, the costs of this content is so high that it wouldn’t be possible for Netflix to just include it in the main offering,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “That means it would need to create special sports add-on packages which subscribers would have to pay for. This would be a major shift for a business like Netflix.”

Of course, they would say that. But it makes sense to strengthen a well-established sports brand, says Adam Dalrymple, of the media pulse-takers Enders Analysis. Its recent report showed TV sport viewing was relatively robust: while broadcast TV figures had plummeted by 26% since 2015, sports viewing was down just 3%. “Every media company is grappling with the digital transition,” Dalrymple says. “But Match of the Day has a head start because it already has a digital home.”

Having tools like this is another way for TikTok to try to reassure smaller advertisers, who already manage Google and Meta spend and have limited marketing teams, that they can multi-home on TikTok without paying an enormous price in time or effort, explained Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis.

“It’s really important given how much Reels and Shorts have grown, and the fact that Meta and Google are continually improving their tools that convert creative across a range of formats, including short-form video,” he added. “These advertisers tend to focus more on immediate ROI, so the hope will be that reducing upfront costs can give them more leeway on their bids for clicks and impressions.”

But as Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis pointed out, new users in a flurry of election digital activism may not be users for life. “The real active users of these networks are still in the millions, as they are the fringes for whom politics is the number one concern,” he added.

Karen Egan of Enders Analysis, a consultancy, estimates that merger synergies would result in a 30% increase in overall network capacity. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), an antitrust watchdog, is due to make a decision on the merger on December 7th; it has suggested that investment in 5G would need to be a legally binding condition of a deal.

“Everyone has been sniffing around, experimenting and trying to work out how to make professional content for social platforms for at least a decade, given it’s such a large source of youth engagement,” explains Tom Harrington, an analyst at Enders Analysis. “Outside China, unless the monetisation models of the platforms change, the risk lies entirely with the content creator: you could front the entire cost of an expensive show and then it doesn’t surface for anyone, and you get no revenue. It’s almost the opposite of TV, where you might get paid on delivery and can often already be ahead before the public even sees the show.”

“It’s fairly grim this year,” said Gareth Sutcliffe, head of gaming at Enders Analysis. “It would be difficult to imagine a holiday season that is less exciting than this one when it comes to gaming hardware.”

“Consoles seem to have hit this very, very hard ceiling of demand and they cannot get past it,” said Sutcliffe at Enders Analysis. “The only model that has exceeded that is in the mobile space, and that is where Switch comes in.”

Douglas McCabe, chief executive and director of publishing and tech at Enders Analysis, believes that Hearst had been putting too much faith in digital platforms, primarily social. “They were overreliant on social media and, to some degree, search as well, because they were over-reliant on programmatic advertising," he says.

McCabe believes that this is just what Hearst needs, a way of sidestepping the trap that others in the magazine market have fallen into, thinking that every eyeball is as valuable “as any other eyeball… In the print world, magazines weren’t trying to sell 35 million copies a month. They never pretended that every single household or every single citizen was equally valuable for their product. What they were aiming for was to find the right audience of 40,000 people, or 100,000 or 200,000.” In other words, it’s not about chasing scale, it’s about chasing engagement (and so encouraging loyalty).