American private equity companies are eyeing both clubs and François Godard, co-author of a ‘Private equity and football’ report for Enders Analysis this week, told The Times: “Very few clubs have the capacity to go and buy other clubs but these ones do and a private equity investor could have the impetus to do that and build a multi-club network.”
When it comes to rating the show’s success, Barb figures are pointless. “There are all sorts of metrics – reaching underserved demos, retaining uncertain subs a bit longer, getting some users to log on to their service instead of another – that feed into whether Netflix sees the show as a success,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis.
Netflix, he stresses, thinks globally. The Netflix audience is still dominated by the USA, where it has 67 million subscribers, followed by Brazil (15m), UK (14m), Germany (13m), France (10m) and Mexico (10m). “The Royal family is IP that travels well, along with the advantage from the thematic tie-in that they’ve done with the recent series of The Crown,” Harrington explains.
But when all is said and done — provided Qatar maintains a safe environment through to Sunday — “they have absolutely pulled it off,” says Claire Enders, founder of leading London-based media consultancy Enders Analysis.
“They have put Qatar on the map of the world and everyone in the world knows where they are and everybody has a more positive view of Qatar than they had before, for sure."
“They established beIN all over the Middle East and in France, and really built an incredible amount of Qatar brand recognition,” said Enders, pointing out that Qatar “certainly went at it ready to spend enormous sums,” given that over the years “the amount they’ve lost [on beIN] is in the many billions.”
Jamie MacEwan said cinema continues to be relatively “recession proof”, with larger scale Hollywood hits becoming more important than ever before.
MacEwan said this was likely to bolster “higher-end” experiences, such as Imax or Curzon, with movies being seen as more of a “treat”.
For this reason, he said there were more “reasons to be cheerful” as head into 2023, with a roster of delayed hits set to be released
From next year the BBC will merge its two 24-hour TV news channels into one global service. Analysts at Enders Analysis have warned that the BBC risked falling behind rivals such as Sky and GB News as a result, while the merger could lead to gaps in its coverage of national news stories.
Until now, ITV has been “reticent” to premier shows online because “they make so much more money on terrestrial” TV, said Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis. But the company’s hand has been forced because “linear viewing is dropping so quickly."
For François Godard, senior analyst at Enders Analysis, the reason for this discrepancy is to be found in the platform's ambition to compete with players like Netflix. "Salto, it was a mistake from the start. Its shareholders are free channels for which the challenge is not to replicate Netflix. How to finance original content with a million subscribers and at very low subscription prices? down ?" Salto is losing money, generating around 50 to 60 million euros in revenue and 180 million in gross losses for its shareholders, according to Les Echos. "The only ones to do this in Europe are Canal+ and Sky. These players have a much greater economy of scale, offering sport and the services of other platforms as aggregators," he continues.
TV expert at research hub Enders Analysis Tom Harrington underplayed this hype around the digital launch.
“ITV is just accepting that it needs to get into the future,” he told City A.M., explaining ITV’s reluctance to evolve in recent years, especially compared to Channel 4 and the BBC.
Other observers worry about the potential impact of increased streaming viewership on ITV’s traditional core networks business. ”We are confident that (ITVX) will be a step change for ITV’s online engagement, however, we believe that ITV may be understating its potential cannibalization of linear,” Enders Analysis analysts Tom Harrington and Gill Hind argued in a Nov. 9 report.
“It has been refreshing to see ITV publicly talking down its current streaming service, the Hub, picking at the failings — its clunkiness, dated feel and lack of content — that have been obvious to consumers for years,” the Enders Analysis duo wrote. “That nothing was done about it sooner was clearly due to mitigation of linear cannibalization and the relative difficulty of monetizing online audiences. If ever there was a sign of a tipping point in the decline of linear, it is this: the least tech-minded broadcaster pushing hard into streaming.”
