“There is not a big licensing opportunity. I don’t think the aim of [the ai models] is to provide alternatives to news,” says Alice Enders of Enders Analysis, a media-research firm.

Record numbers of young viewers are switching off traditional television in favour of short-form content, according to the media regulator, Ofcom, with Enders Analysis suggesting a 30% decline in 16- to 34-year-olds watching TV shows with their parents over the last 10 years.

“[MFE] want to buy it and they will want to buy on the best possible terms,” said François Godard, an analyst at Enders covering European broadcasters. “Their approach now is just showing this, it’s brinkmanship.”

The precise form of the scheme that will be chosen remains to be specified, as some analysts, such as François Godard at the British firm Enders Analysis, imagine the creation of a local entity that would be listed in the country. In any case, the pay-TV channel confirmed its intention to maintain a listing in Johannesburg, "so that South African investors can benefit from the future growth of the company," the statement said.

“It is in decline,” said Tom Harrington, the head of television at the research firm Enders Analysis. “Viewership numbers are pushed up by older people, who only watch broadcast television, and watch a lot of it.”

That decline is not the whole picture, though, Harrington said. “People still spend more time watching linear television than they spend doing anything else, except sleep and work,” he said. “It still commands an enormous amount of attention.”

The greater change, Harrington said, was in the “communality” of the experience: We consume more content than ever, but we tend to do it on our own. That means there is less overlap between what young people watch and what older generations do. “Those touch points have been lost,” he said. “And that means there is a lack of common culture, which is a little bit sad.”

“The scale of the spend involved is staggering,” says Gareth Sutcliffe, an analyst at Enders Analysis. “You can only conclude that this was a deeply antagonistic battle between the principals.”

"Peltz is an unusual character because what he's doing is going around to multiple companies and saying ‘I'm going to fix the show,'" says senior media entertainment analyst Gareth Sutcliffe from Enders Analysis.

"But the key point is an activist investor is only as good as the questions that they are asking of the board.

"And I think that the key point is that you want to have nominees who clearly have a background and experience and are helpful in terms of moving a company forward to the next stage."

"You cannot underestimate the level of interest there is in a company like Disney and the fact that people always think that they have the best ideas," Mr Sutcliffe said.

“There definitely is a considerable risk that it doesn’t get approved,” Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said. “There is a lot of logic for the deal and I think political and regulatory support among those familiar with the industry, but the CMA is a law onto itself and its way of looking at these things can be quite narrow and technical.”

“Paramount has devoted most of its scripted content budget to Taylor Sheridan after signing a multi-year deal with him in 2021 and his output has been astonishing,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “His phenomenal speed – nine shows in three years – is at another level when it comes to creating franchises. There are others who have commanded similar control over the output of individual networks, like Law & Order’s Dick Wolf at NBC but he took years to expand his universe. The Sheridanverse feels like it has materialised in months.”