Football leagues must think innovatively about maintaining broad exposure, but relying on advertising revenues from free-to-air TV makes no economic sense.

Creating league-operated direct-to-consumer platforms would undermine the very competition between broadcasters that has propelled rights.

The only realistic option for sustainable growth is deeper, longer-term partnerships with broadcasters.

Streaming profitability beckons, but owes much to the profitable services folded into companies’ DTC segments alongside the headline streamers.

There is a broader move towards bundling and price rises. The former bolsters subscriber additions and lifetime value but is ARPU-dilutive, while price rises will bump up both ARPU and churn.

2024 marks the first year with multiple players at scale in the ad space, as Prime Video entered the market. Other streamers with high CPMs and lower scale may be forced to re-examine their offerings.

As guided, ITV’s advertising performance was down 8% year-on-year (£1.8 billion), while Studios performed slightly better than expected (+4%, £2.2 billion): meaning that adjusted EBITA, while challenged (-32%, £489 million) could have been worse given the trials of H1

Unsurprisingly, ITV has announced an acceleration of its cost-cutting measures which intensifies an earlier hiring freeze: costs have risen 19% since before COVID, while revenues are only up 10%

ITVX continues its strong growth, and although we think that this needs to be contextualised, there are unintended but encouraging signs for the broadcaster

As viewing moves online, broadcasters’ on-demand players make up a growing proportion of viewing, becoming central to their future strategies.

However, even though SVOD viewing might have begun to plateau, BVOD growth cannot yet balance the decline of linear broadcast.

Of this shrinking pie, 2023 saw most of the major broadcast players increase their viewing shares.

Disney's bottom line results were flattered by a year-long cost cutting drive: the decline in linear entertainment revenue is accelerating and direct-to-consumer subscriber growth has temporarily stalled.

A new sports JV with Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox, along with other announcements are designed to grab attention in midst of turbulent shareholder rebellion.  Disney also—at last—unveiled a new games initiative with a $1.5 billion equity stake in Epic Games and a major immersive universe to attract younger audiences.

Disney's approach to the licensing of content to third parties is nuanced and so will be its effect on the perception of Disney+'s exclusivity.

Dramas from the public service broadcasters based on books consistently bring in bigger audiences than those that are not, a trend driven by certain genres, especially detective mysteries and thrillers.

A greater volume of newer book IP is being developed into programming, but this preference is not necessarily reflected in audience figures.                                 

Younger demographics are less enamoured with dramas based on books than older viewers. There are however notable exceptions, while attracting younger audiences may have more to do with the age, genre, and fame of the IP.

The quest for sustainability in the UK national news industry is gaining ground, thanks to digital growth offsetting relentless print decline. The challenge of the print-to-digital transition has not faded, however, amidst the oncoming cliff-edge for print.

Nationals choosing the path of the walled garden on digital have out-performed those in pursuit of the ad-supported mass-market audience, whose ad yield per user is being compressed by more efficient scale platforms and the end of tracking technology.

Despite the challenges facing the news industry, the beacon of light shone by professional journalism has never been more important to humanity, to combat disinformation and misinformation on the internet, which Gen AI tools will only exacerbate.

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