However, the head of television at Enders Analysis, Tom Harrington, thinks the current row is unlikely to damage Strictly’s global appeal. “I don’t think anyone in Belgium or wherever is reading the press here and thinking: ‘I’m less likely to watch the Belgian version.’ It’s very well insulated. Other than maybe the problems that they’ve allegedly had in the UK could be happening somewhere else.” Harrington said that selling formats is estimated to make up about 20% of BBC Studios’ revenues but that the big formats are “very, very high margin … and incredibly lucrative”, which helps to explain Strictly’s importance to the BBC at a time when it is facing cuts because fewer people are paying the licence fee and, the BBC argues, 14 years of funding cuts by Conservative-led governments have reduced its budget by 30% in real terms.

“The decline in the last quarter is not particularly worse than previous periods but the writedown and the future impact of losing NBA games has crystallised the decline in the eyes of the investors, hence the reaction,” explains Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “The core problem Zaslav has which, say, Disney doesn’t, is that the company doesn’t really have truly mass-market content, which is what you need for success in streaming – and you need to have success in streaming to balance the decline in linear.”

Head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, Karen Egan, said the current take up rate “will certainly not justify the investment made in the company thus far.” Egan said the deal could “massively improve” Cityfibre’s prospects, especially in rural areas where Openreach is unlikely to venture anytime soon.

A report by Enders Analysis earlier this year titled “UK Altnets: The beginning of the end?”, captured the situation well. This week’s agreement between CityFibre and my employer, Sky, will – as well as hurting BT’s Openreach arm – accelerate the impetus to consolidate into fewer than a handful of players.

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, said the announcement was “a very positive move forward for CityFibre”, adding that it was “not good news” for Openreach and could potentially put some pressure on its wholesale prices.

It’s “a very positive move forward for CityFibre regardless, as Sky hitherto was showing no inclination to deal with anyone beyond Openreach,” said Karen Egan, an analyst at Enders.

“The cost of living crisis is making it harder for customers to afford new handsets – and some customers may not be able to afford the expense of upgrading when they would like to do so,” wrote market watchers at Enders Analysis in a note this week. “While inflation has come down to targeted levels, it will take some time for wages to catch up and for households to feel well off enough to make big purchases again, and so this impact may wane very slowly.”

Karen said “[Mittal] is not short-term. He’ll be completely constructive and collaborative with BT, he really understands the holistic approach of telecoms." She added that taking a stake in BT was not an obvious move for the company but Mittal’s experience will have given him an understanding of where BT needs to focus.

Joseph said the AI search market was “hotting up”. “The risk from AI is . . . that general web search as a whole is made redundant by new ways of matching users with information, products and services,” he said. The “big unknown”, however, is whether it can be reliable enough for mainstream use. “AI is stubbornly prone to confabulation,” Teasdale said. “At the scale of billions of queries per day, serious failures are inevitable.”