But GB News lost more than £30mn in the year to May 2022, on a turnover of £3.6mn, according to accounts filed in March. Claire Enders, a media analyst, said news broadcasting was rarely profitable without global reach, an uphill task for GB News.

Succession has also redefined the notion of TV success. “Its cultural impact is much bigger than its audience,” Tom Standen-Jewell of media consultants Enders Analysis told i.

“You wouldn’t know that Coronation Street has four times the audience of Succession from the critical buzz. But it’s a big marketing tool for HBO and Sky to keep subscribers.”

“Everyone praises the dialogue, which is superbly crafted with a nihilism and nastiness. That craft was honed writing comedies like Peep Show and The Thick of It for Channel 4 and the BBC,” Standen-Jewell said.

“Those themes of cynicism about those in power are now widely shared in the US and UK.”

“Prince Harry is on a mission against what he regards to be a ‘system’ that exists in Britain between the tabloid media and the Royal Household,” said media analyst Alice Enders. “He wishes . . . on principle to wreak as much reputational damage as possible. The money obviously doesn’t matter as much as the mission. Phone hacking has just fallen out of the public eye, and Prince Harry has brought it back to the fore.”

Enders Analysis chief executive Douglas McCabe similarly told Press Gazette he was "absolutely convinced we're not at the ceiling" of the subscriptions market for news publishers.

"I also think publishers underrate the degree to which they control the ceiling," he continued, explaining that the question of whether the market is maxed out "makes an assumption that the market has a natural shape to it that cannot be influenced by the quality of supply. I think that's completely just not true."

For example, he said, The Guardian has never put up a hard paywall but changed its messaging asking people to pay and "gone from a market of nobody buying anything to a market of more than a million people contributing every month."

As a result, he added, The Guardian "moved the ceiling several inches higher" and redefined the market not as a premium subscription industry but one that values journalism more generally.

Enders analyst James Barford said Drahi's share purchase showed the telecoms investor's confidence that BT would in future reap the benefits of the fibre build which is expected to more than double future cash flow.

"That's possibly the opportunity that he's seen here, in that if he believes that they can deliver on that, and that it's a strong path," Barford said.

"For Comcast the issue is about sending a message of decisiveness to investors," said François Godard, senior media and telecoms analyst at Enders Analysis, adding that Sky did not have enough scale to compete in the German market.

"ProSieben and their Joyn platform could be the solution," he said.

Twitter Blue to the rescue? In the three months since the $8 per month subscription launched, only 300,000 users have registered, generating a mere $28 million in revenue, according to Enders Analysis. On the horizon is an ad free Twitter Blue (cost to be confirmed) and a gold verification for organisations at $1,000 per month. Neither have generated any revenue to date. But Musk’s masterplan is to turn Twitter into a Chinese-style super-app under the holding company “X Corp” offering messaging, payments and entertainment. But according to Joseph Teasdale, Enders’s head of technology, “it’s a pipe dream”. Twitter has neither the regulatory environment nor demographics which underpinned the success of the Chinese apps that Musk wishes to emulate. He needs the advertisers.

Joseph Teasdale, head of technology at Enders Analysis, says some of the problems faced by the digital darlings during that formative time (the terrible technological teen years) were that they remained “good pitches still looking for a business plan”. Investors will happily splurge cash on the hope of future success, but only for a finite amount of time.

James Barford, head of telecoms research at Enders Analysis, said the BT job cuts were mostly about fewer people being needed in building networks, whereas the Vodafone cuts were "more general efficiency savings".

He said that in both cases plans were "already broadly in place, with savings previously described in monetary terms rather than headcount reduction".

Possibly, the firms are now talking about job cuts "to help convince sceptical investors that they will actually deliver the promised savings", Mr Barford added.