Sky chief executive Dana Strong has called on government and regulators to take up a “supportive stance” that encourages collaboration between UK media companies and allows them to compete against global players. 

Speaking at the Enders TMT Leaders Live conference this morning, the former Comcast exec talked up the need for “collaboration and partnership” between UK organisations to provide value to customers and keep audiences within their ecosystems. 

Carolyn McCall spoke at an Enders industry conference in London on Thursday.

Asked about this potential shedding of the M&E arm at the Enders TMT Leaders Live conference in the British capital, McCall offered: “Shedding is a bad word,” signaling that she would use a different phrase for the strategy behind the possible deal. But she also highlighted that she couldn’t discuss the possible merger as the talks are ongoing.

Earlier in the conference day, Comcast’s European TV and telecom powerhouse Sky was in the spotlight, with group CEO Dana Strong taking the Enders stage. She was not asked about the potential acquisition of a part of ITV.

Kevin MacLellan told the Enders TMT Leaders Live Conference that his hire at the new Paramount-Skydance, which will soon incorporate Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), came at a time when the “frightened paralysis” of the film and TV industry was coming to an end.

MacLellan is an international TV and film vet who worked for a decade at NBCUniversal. He was speaking at the Enders conference after international chiefs from Netflix, WBD and Disney.

The chief executive of ITV said that ​the British broadcaster ‌was still "very much actively engaged" in a deal ​to sell its ​media and entertainment division ⁠to Comcast's Sky.

"We ​are very much ​actively engaged in discussions," CEO Carolyn McCall told the ​Enders TMT ​Leaders Live conference on Thursday.

“Temu’s strategy is transitioning to focus more on efficiency and user retention through platforms that offer a balance of targeting and price performance,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “Realigning their advertising strategy towards incremental sales reflects their growing platform maturity and the lower impact of tariff price barriers on consumers already bought into the broader platform experience.”

“Launching CPA advertising is a logical next step for OpenAI’s ads business,” said Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “It expands its offering while diversifying its pool of advertisers, and aligns its product more closely with that of Meta and Google, whom it must compete effectively against to reach its own targets.”

It was reported in April that OpenAI projects it’ll achieve $2 billion in advertising by the end of 2026, rising to $102 billion by 2030. And Enders Analysis has charted how it expects that to grow. Within the next two years, Enders projects that OpenAI will record about $25 billion in ChatGPT consumer ads — a 1150% increase from where it is now. That figure is expected to more than double in 2029 to $53 billion and again to $102 billion by 2030. The scale of those forecasts sits in sharp contrast to the early-stage constraints still visible in the pilot today — and to current engagement trends.

Niamh Burns, of Enders Analysis, says the latest changes mean “consumers can offload more and more of their cognitive effort, and their website visits, to AI”.

“There needs to be a functioning economic grounding here if the open web isn’t going to wither,” says Burns. “Google does rely on this ecosystem, so this is Google’s problem to solve too.”

BT, Virgin Media O2 and VodafoneThree lost a combined 972,000 mobile subscribers last year according to data compiled by Enders Analysis, which estimated that low-cost rivals including Lebara, iD Mobile and Sky gained more than 1.5mn by comparison. They lost 724,000 in 2024.

“Great deals for MVNOs have arguably been a collective strategic mis-step by the operators, but the VodafoneThree remedies now tie them to that for many years to come,” Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis said.

Its rivals, meanwhile, seem to have slowed their rate of sprawl. No longer fuelled by cheap funding, they are building about 40 per cent less than they were in 2025, according to Goldman Sachs research. Not all of the hundred or so will make it out alive. Most would need to more than double the average altnet’s market penetration of about 19 per cent to break even, according to Enders Analysis.

BT’s own capital expenditure has tailed off, set to fall about £1bn this year as it aims to complete its fibre coverage of UK homes by 2032. Keeping up the pace is also easier for BT, where the investment required to build infrastructure that runs past a single home is about half what altnets spend, according to Enders Analysis.