“Compared to social media or a TV channel the harms of allowing extremist content are lower for Substack, because people don’t find newsletters on Substack,” says Joe Teasdale at Enders Analysis. “It basically just provides publishing, communication and payments services.”
Abi Watson, a senior research analyst at media consultancy Enders Analysis, said it appeared that all of the company’s earnings were being passed to shareholders. “The question is whether this is coming at the expense of investment in the business,” she said.
“This is undoubtedly a good deal for Canal as the price of Viaplay has fallen in recent months. The two groups know each other well since Viaplay sells sports rights in Poland to Canal. And in the territories from which Viaplay exits, we could imagine mergers of customer bases between the two,” underlines François Godard, analyst at Enders Analysis.
“He wanted to internationalize too quickly,” analyzes François Godard. Before the summer, he plunged into the stock market after reviewing his prospects and changing bosses. It then announced that it was parting ways with a quarter of its workforce and exiting several international markets. In 2023, the stock lost 97% of its value, after having already fallen significantly in 2022.
Developed internally, “MyCanal is the only French platform from historic television which has the ambition to be an interface for all other channels,” notes François Godard, analyst at Enders Analysis. A strategic position, occupied by powerful rivals like Apple TV, Amazon's Fire or Google's Chromecast, or by applications from television manufacturers. However, “whoever controls access is in a position to organize consumption,” underlines the expert.
“They have really accomplished their project of becoming a super-aggregator, with a very coherent design for navigating between different catalogs and a fairly unique experience where you can easily navigate between live and replay,” greets a professional in the sector, for whom the interface is an international benchmark.
According to Enders Analysis, even with a high subscription rate comparable to Netflix, revenue generated would fall short by over £1bn compared to the current licence fee.
Gill Hind, chief operating officer and TV director at Enders Analysis, told City A.M. that DCMS will most likely be looking at tweaking the licence fee or exploring a tax-based solution, drawing inspiration from systems evolving in countries like Germany and Finland.
“Whatever change is made,” she said, “it is going to take a huge amount of time to implement because obviously you need to get the buy-in of everyone including politicians in all parties.
“So, I think the first and foremost thing they’ll be looking at is actually what can be done with the current mechanism and how could that potentially be altered in some shape or form,” Hind explained.
In October, despite lighter viewers consuming three times more online content compared to 2022, daily viewing only increased minimally due to low initial engagement, according to Enders Analysis. In contrast, heavy ITV linear viewers increased their online viewing nearly fivefold.
“There is Netflix and then there is sort of everyone else,” says Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis. “Everyone except Netflix is making losses quarter by quarter. While Netflix hasn’t of course yet balanced its billions in losses it is now making profits and will catch that up pretty quickly now.”
“The monetisation strategy of streaming content has been quite simply crazy,” says Harrington. “Viewers have been bingeing content that is now more expensive than ever to create despite the history of TV and film being all about ‘windows’ of commercialising content on different platforms to make them pay over and over again for years. It just hasn’t been profitable.”
Karen Egan, a senior telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, said Lebara would “attract a high [ebitda] multiple” as MVNOs have low levels of capital expenditure and are becoming “very attractive” to network operators because of their subscriber bases.
“I think that multiples could be higher now given the strength of the MVNOs both in terms of growth trajectory and ability to move between network operators,” Egan added.
