Media experts Enders Analysis also revealed there had been a 25 per cent fall in the number of shows that are popular with 'both demographics' in five years. Their report said despite 'the explosion in volume and access to content', the viewing of proper TV shows was 'narrowing around fewer programmes', adding: 'At the same time, younger viewers are watching a greater proportion of video alone, resulting in a growing schism between what is watched by young and older viewers.' The report added that the content available to the average person had increased 12-fold between 2014 to 2023.

But Apple TV+ isn’t a straightforward streamer. “Apple is a phone company, and its growth came through selling iPhones, more iPhones and then charging more for iPhones until a couple of years ago it realised that the billion richest people in the world have an iPhone,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “They’ve topped out and have to look for growth elsewhere, so their next big move is – how do we monetise that base? They’ve decided it’s in providing services to that billion.”

“I don’t know if they have fully figured out what they want to do with TV,” says Wolk. “It’s a bit of a mystery,” Harrington agrees. “They don’t really licence content very much. Their process in terms of commissioning is slower than everyone else. They approach content like a tech company with iterations to perfection rather than the TV model where you throw a bunch of stuff out there and sometimes it works.

Swisscom will merge Vodafone Italia with Fastweb, its Italian subsidiary, creating Italy’s largest mobile operator with a 28 per cent market share and a strong presence in the business market, according to Enders Analysis, the research provider.

And the company is still grappling with its flailing German business, which remains its largest market. Karen Egan, at research group Enders Analysis, said: 'The company is highlighting how well it is positioned to grow now without Italy and Spain, and with the prospect of a better position in the UK.

'Germany is more important than ever, and the jury is still out on that turnaround.'

 

“One thing that is certain is that Margherita Della Valle has delivered on the deal front having taken over as CEO less than a year ago,” Enders Analysis analyst Karen Egan said in a note on Friday. “If she can deliver on a change in structure and culture to the benefit of the operational performance as convincingly as she has done with dealmaking, then the Vodafone story really could start a very promising new chapter.”

Karen said "The company is highlighting how well it is positioned to grow now without Italy and Spain, and with the prospect of a better position in the UK."

“Germany is more important than ever, and the jury is still out on that turnaround.”

“Frankly, there is no one silver bullet platform,” says Abi Watson, senior media analyst at Enders Analysis. “There has been a huge proliferation of platforms and changes where people spend their time online.”

“Google’s monopoly over search is an obvious risk,” says Watson, while “longer-term risk of an AI-enabled search engine that cuts publishers out entirely is an existential risk.” Google has reportedly begun paying some smaller publishers to test an AI tool that lets them scrape other news sites’ content and aggregate it into a new article, a practice that a news industry executive called “potentially troubling.”

“The benefit of LinkedIn is that it has some aligned incentives with publishers. LinkedIn wants to become the centre of people’s online professional life, rather than a platform they visit during a job search,” says Watson.

François Godard, Senior Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis, explains Netflix's success with the platform's market power: “Only Netflix can publish a series that the whole world is talking about. The others need the cinema for that.” The streaming providers don’t have to lure viewers into the movie theater with their productions, but rather just to pick up the remote control on the couch. “Netflixen” has even made it into the dictionary as a verb for an evening of film and television.

While there used to be months between the cinema premiere and release on DVD, Bluray or streaming portals, it is now only weeks or days - if at all. “The cinema releases have become shorter and shorter,” says analyst Godard. And that's a problem for movie theaters.

‘The need for expensive content to cut through immediately is huge,’ says Tom Harrington of industry specialist Enders Analysis. UK broadcasters’ budgets are increasingly being squeezed by falling ad revenue and a frozen licence fee. 

The financial pressures have meant fewer commissions overall, with a headline in the industry journal Broadcast in January saying they had fallen ‘across the board’ in 2023. When commissioners do green-light a project, they are playing it safe. ‘[They know] sequels, spinoffs and reboots are successful, so each year there’s a doubling down,’ says Harrington. 

‘TV is no different, thanks to international streamers and algorithms. But it’s not just the streamers – the BBC relaunching Gladiators or ITV commissioning regular true-crime dramas is the same on a smaller scale.’

One reason, according to Gareth Sutcliffe of analytical company Enders Analysis, is that although “all of these games companies are inherently profitable, what happened during the pandemic is that they went on kind of a hiring binge and the cost of labour during that period was really, really high.

“They were paying over and above the odds for developer talent; for engineering talent; for all of the kind of stuff that was used to make games and so what we're now getting is a correction.”