On 4 June 2024, Enders Analysis co-hosted the annual Media and Telecoms 2024 & Beyond Conference with Deloitte, sponsored by Barclays, Salesforce, the Financial Times, and Adobe.

With over 580 attendees and over 40 speakers from the TMT sector, including leading executives and industry experts, the conference focused on how new technologies, regulation and infrastructure will impact the future of the industry.

This is the edited transcript of Session One, covering: the evolution of streaming models, and public service broadcasting in the digital age. Videos of the presentations will be available on the conference website.

The BBC plans to launch four new digital music stations as extensions of Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 3 and enhance 5 Sports Extra, all subject to regulatory approval.

Commercial radio is flourishing due to continuous innovation, while in stark contrast the BBC has experienced large audience losses, especially among the young.

The BBC should be able to launch new services— subject to competition assessments—while Ofcom should consider the impact of the total station regardless of whether delivery is broadcast or online.

The US is intent on preventing the CCP’s goal of AI supremacy by 2030, banning exports of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. So far, these bans have largely been shrugged off to create a new commercial dynamic in the region. 

Huawei wields a de facto monopoly on the manufacture and sale of advanced chips in China. Huawei also sells cloud services globally and threatens Apple's $70 billion in Chinese revenues through its premium handsets. 

China’s AI regulation is highly supportive of the training and deployment of Chinese-language LLMs developed by tech platforms, startups, and device makers, with meaningful revenue gains only appearing by H2 2024. 

Device makers regained their mojo at this year’s MWC, with phones a crucial route to generative AI becoming a daily habit. 

AI software has improved and proliferated, but limited differentiation leaves room for consolidation as a competitive funding crunch looms. 

Unanswered questions loom large, but won't dim AI's potential. 

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.

Amazon is finding women’s fashion, a missing piece of its household-centric model, a tougher nut to crack than downmarket apparel.

Higher-end US department stores are pushing back with an omnichannel model, emphasising long-term partnerships, a clever full-price/outlet model, and experiences which cross the online-offline divide.

In apparel, Amazon and big box retailers have already triumphed over lower-tier American department stores, and even prestigious fashion brands are finding it harder and harder to refuse cooperation with the giants.

With a carefully priced, strong line-up of iPhones, Apple will consolidate its main revenue line and core user base in the near term

The latter feeds into a services business showing impressive growth, but which is also marked by missed opportunities and mounting negative consequences on the rest of the online ecosystem

For media businesses, Apple’s impact is larger than ever, inevitably leading to new kinds of friction around commercial terms, App store policies and browser features

Video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook video, enjoy a light-touch regulatory regime for harmful content and advertising. As video viewing of non-broadcaster content grows, the regulatory gap between TV broadcasters and video-sharing platforms widens, part of a broader uneven playing field for publishers and platforms.

However, there is momentum against this: the “platforms vs publishers” divide looks set to weaken in EU law, and the platforms themselves are investing more in combatting harmful content within a self-regulatory regime, though their internal policies and outcomes are still opaque.

Effective and fair regulation of video-sharing platforms would involve the balancing of national freedom of speech conventions and the public utility of user-generated video hosting with concerned stakeholder views: something approaching a co-regulatory system for online video-sharing platforms.

Although launched with an array of public service goals in mind, local TV’s flawed design has created a sector struggling to live up to its optimistic ambitions. 

Five years and £37 million of licence fee monies later, it is unclear what public service contributions are being made, or whether the scheme has provided value-for-money. A wholesale review of the sector is urgently needed.

The vision of a “thriving and sustainable” sector has fallen flat. Most licences remain loss-making, with doubts as to their long-term viability. Those operating low-cost models seem best placed to survive.