Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media & Telecoms 2017 & Beyond conference in conjunction with Deloitte, Moelis & Company, Linklaters and LionTree, in London on 2 March 2017.

This report contains the slides used by Tom Mockridge, Matthew Kirk, Andrew Griffith, and Geoff Moelis.

Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media & Telecoms 2017 & Beyond conference in conjunction with Deloitte, Moelis & Company, Linklaters and LionTree, in London on 2 March 2017.

The day saw over 450 senior attendees come together to listen to 30 leaders and senior executives of some of the most creative and innovative businesses in the media and telecoms sector, and was chaired by David Abraham.

This report provides edited transcripts of the presentations and panels, and you will find accompanying slides for some of the presentations here.

Videos of the presentations are available on the conference website.

The temporary cool-off in hype around VR following a very buzzy 2016 is not reducing the flow of investment and talent into the industry, notably in video production utilising 360Video technology; setting the stage for the development of a truly new entertainment medium

Fully immersive interactive worlds will continue to be the mainstay of the video games industry, while video entertainment will exist in a multi-track environment, with some genres (news, documentaries , natural history) making 360Video mainstream well before long-form narrative-driven entertainment

2017 will still be a challenging year for consumer device VR roll-out and mass market adoption; Oculus, Google, and Sony continue to seed the market, providing large scale funding and equipment directly to developers and content producers

The latest auction of UEFA Champions League televised UK rights has seen further high 32% inflation as BT renewed its ownership for the three seasons from 2018/19 for an annual payment of £394 million

Although BT annual payments are to increase by £95 million from 2018/19, the new contract offers added commercial attractions, though we expect BT’s efforts to monetise them will fall some way short of the cost increase

However, BT had to win to cement its position against Sky as a strong number two in UK premium pay TV and we expect weaker future inflation of premium football rights. For Sky followers, the focus is now on the UEFA auctions in Germany and Italy, where the outcome is far from certain

Linear television's audience is ageing; with the drop in viewing by younger demographics, consistent viewership by the over 65s has seen them increase their share of total viewing since 2010 from 24% to 31%

The difficulties and efforts to re-engage with the younger cohorts are well documented. But what of the resilient, older group that forms the stable core of the television audience?

Conspicuous attempts are being made to create specific shows targeted at the oldest viewers, but outside of limited categories, creating relevant programming may be more difficult than expected

2016 proved a mixed year for ITV as sizeable falls in TV spot advertising and Studios US revenues were offset by continuing strong growth in Online, Pay & Interactive and ITV Studios, while ITV ended the year with a very healthy balance sheet

As the economy and advertising enter testing times, diversification may not only have helped reduce ITV’s reliance on this highly volatile income stream, but also the growth of ITV Studios may just be starting to pay off in terms of reversing the decline in ITV Main audience share  

Looking ahead, the strategic focus of ITV has shifted, now placing greater emphasis on expanding ITV content distribution at home and abroad across multiple platforms, all age groups, and growing new revenue streams, especially pay, to extract added value from its growing content assets

In the UK, traditional broadcast television's future appears threatened, as technological developments increasingly allow people to access video content on demand, whether on TV sets or other screens, or from traditional broadcasters or online services.

This report examines the extent to which timeshift viewing, by which we mean personal video recorder (PVR) playback and viewing to catch-up services, has bolstered linear TV.

The linear schedule is still very relevant for both consumers and advertisers, maintaining television’s status as an effective mass medium for building brands.

This report examines Ofcom's proposal that independently funded news consortia (IFNCs) assume the provision of regional TV news, occupying the regional news time slots vacated by the Channel 3 licensees

IFNCs are to be composed of commercial news organisations (television producers, newspaper groups, radio stations or websites), and will operate as private commercial/publicly funded hybrid models of regional news gathering and provision, alongside the BBC and commercial news organisations

DCMS has invited tenders for three IFNC pilots covering Channel 3 regions in Northern England and the Borders, Scotland and Wales, to be awarded in May 2010 with operations to commence by summer 2010.

The impending Competition Commission announcement of its provisional decision concerning the Contract Rights Renewal (CRR) remedy is expected to make little change beyond extending CRR to cover variants of ITV1, such as ITV1 +1 and ITV1 HD

Extending CRR to cover ITV1 variants should benefit ITV NAR (Net Advertising Revenue) by improving ITV1’s overall audience share, but does nothing to ease the deflationary pressures now gripping the TV advertising medium, where CRR works hand in hand with the requirement on the commercial PSB channels to sell 100% of their advertising inventories

The current goings on underline the dichotomy between competition and public broadcasting policy objectives

ITV reported a pre-tax loss of £14 million in H1 2009 as the advertising recession took a grip, with total TV NAR down an estimated 17% against H1 2008, while ITV family NAR fell year on year by 15%

Although visibility over future advertising spend is restricted to a couple of months, we expect significant further decline in total TV NAR over the remainder of 2009 and 2010, before recovery starts in 2011/12

Cost savings, debt-restructuring and disposal of non-core assets, including Friends Reunited and SDN, should see ITV through the worst and we expect it to benefit later on from regulatory changes to its core advertising business