TikTok has reached a billion users worldwide just four years after its global launch, much quicker than social media rivals, though its ban in India is a drag on growth.

TikTok’s popularity with under-25s has contributed to a hollowing-out of Meta’s active userbase. During the pandemic, TikTok also expanded its reach among older demographics, cementing its position within the mainstream and posing a further threat to Meta. 

TikTok could earn twice as much revenue as Snap in 2022, making it the first app to break out of the mid-league in years, with a huge runway for growth backed up by ByteDance’s remarkable success in China. 

Sky’s performance across 2021 significantly improved, driven in Q4 by a nice c.5% growth rate in UK consumer revenues and the advertising rebound, but effects of the pandemic are still being felt with EBITDA down 30% on 2019.

The decline in Group revenue accelerated in Q4 due to the severe shock to the Italian operation from its loss of most premium football coverage, although we see upsides in a possible rights reshuffle.

In 2022, Sky can leverage growth vectors including bigger content bundles, Glass, advertising innovations and broadband. Consolidating SVOD and telecoms markets may be more favourable to price increases.

There are just under eight million adults in the UK who only have access to free-to-air television, relying on it as a vital source of entertainment, information and company

These viewers watch much more television, and depend heavily upon the diversity and quality of content delivered by the BBC and other public service broadcasters

Without further support for PSB content in all genres, for all audiences, there is a risk of leaving millions of people out of ever-rarer shared cultural conversations, speeding up feedback loops of viewer decline, and losing the core public value in the ecosystem as a whole

Ofcom will announce at the end of June the new terms for ITV to operate the analogue portion of its broadcast licence for ITV1. According to Ofcom's own statements, it is obliged to estimate the full value of ITV’s operation of the analogue ITV1 service and then extract all this value – bar some profit and other small allowances – in the form of annual licence payments. To do so, Ofcom has announced a methodology based on what the winning broadcaster would bid in a hypothetical competitive tender. In order to estimate the licence payments, analysts must grapple with the highly complex tasks of inferring the model from Ofcom's description and establishing the inputs.

An eventual merger is possible but difficult, especially given Hutchison Whampoa’s inflated view of H3G Italia’s value, considering it worth about the same as Wind itself, which is double the size and actually makes a profit (unlike H3G Italia)

Nonetheless, this does create a possible exit should H3G Italia’s planned Q1 2006 IPO fail, with the consolidation likely to benefit all players in the Italian market. H3G UK does not enjoy such an option, and is struggling more on a stand-alone basis to boot