Alice Enders, of the media research firm Enders Analysis, said: “Rupert has always played an outsized role in his businesses. For example, people know it is Rupert Murdoch who is interested in buying the Spectator. Normally you’d find people saying it’s the company – ‘News Corp is interested’. Rupert is still very much in control.”

Enders said Rupert is not leaving the stage: “While it is very much the end of an era, the fact is he retains the ownership interest in the family trust, which to be honest gives him the same power whether he is in the saddle or on the deck chair.”

Gareth Sutcliffe, games analyst at Enders Analysis, a consultancy, said: “With cloud gaming such a small sector of the overall industry, the [provisional] approval represents a grand compromise for both parties, with the most important components of the deal still intact.”

“It’s always going to be a challenge replicating TikTok’s Chinese e-commerce business, which is worth hundreds of billions a year, but this is a company with a very tight focus, knowledge of how to make the tech work, and a willingness to sink billions to get there,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis.

“It is a uniquely terrible idea,” said Joseph Teasdale, head of tech at Enders Analysis.

“The reason anyone is on Twitter is because of the other people who are there. Doing something that would cause huge volumes of people to leave, like charging users, will undermine the fundamental value of the platform.

“Twitter’s problem historically was the amount of friction involved in onboarding new users – charging will supercharge, not solve, that problem.”

The new platform will offer a common program guide. “Freely wants to give channels back, on connected televisions, the pre-eminence they had on DTT,” summarises Gill Hind, director of television at Enders Analysis.

"We are in an experience economy where people crave going out and participating in social events," Alice Enders, a music industry analyst at Enders Analysis and a former senior economist at the World Trade Organization told CNN. "It's no surprise that people are flocking to this Eras Tour experience in what is increasingly an otherwise digital environment we live in."

The current deal is worth €662 million a year for the domestic rights, according to Francois Godard, a media analyst at Enders Analysis.

“I see no reason why the total league intake for domestic rights would rise,” he said

Joseph Teasdale, tech analyst at Enders, said: “The big question is who captures the economic benefits of the AI goldrush — is it companies like Arm who design chip architecture, companies like Nvidia who make the GPUs [graphics processing units] that AI data centres run on, or companies like Google and Microsoft who make AI usable for businesses?”

Media analyst Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, has suggested Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp could be tempted by The Spectator.

Much of this is the result of services such as Netflix that have eroded the structural advantages enjoyed by linear TV providers in the past, says Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis.

“For cable TV providers like Charter, it is about as bad as it has ever been,” says Harrington.

The Disney-Charter dispute should be seen in this context, says Harrington.

“Cable TV companies are under stress. But Charter probably thinks that Disney is under pressure too, and has calculated they can push it a bit further than if things were going well,” he explains.

“They also feel that Disney’s channels are not worth as much as they were during the last negotiations, because a lot of content is now on Disney+.”