The BBC announced that it should be active in planning for broadcast switch-off, but that the UK should be fully connected with universal affordable access to content.

World Radiocommunications Congress (WRC-23) takes place next year and the long-term future of DTT across EMEA will be debated. If WRC agrees coprimary access to existing DTT spectrum for mobile, this likely spells the end for DTT in the early 2030s.

By 2034, at the current migration rate, nearly 20 billion hours of TV will be viewed in DTT homes—just 20% less than today—with over 80% of that being to adults over 55.

With major studios arguably over-indexed on SVOD, the stickier experiences of interactive entertainment and the metaverse will eventually form a critical pillar of studio D2C strategy, boosting subscription services and tying in closely with consumer products and theme parks.

Disney’s appointment of a Chief Metaverse Officer is good first step, demonstrating a strategic interest in the space. But other major studios remain cautious and distracted, with limited capability beyond licensing to engage in the metaverse for the next 24 months and possibly longer.

Meta will need to provide a strong guiding hand creatively and technically to ensure its new partnership with NBCUniversal is a success, and to evangelise the metaverse and its revenue model across the Hollywood studio content space.

Global SVOD operators are expanding their sports content offerings. Amazon just bought UK Champions League rights, Apple signed US baseball and global football (soccer) deals, Paramount and partners won the Indian Premier League cricket auction, while Netflix unsuccessfully bid on the US Formula One licence.

In the US, streamers feed an already very competitive market, while in Europe they could potentially relaunch inflation for rights after a period of stagnation. Next moves by Warner Bros. Discovery (BT Sport and Eurosport) and Disney will be critical. Sky and Canal+ could be facing upward cost pressures.

If rights fragmentation were to increase, deeper aggregation and bundling may be necessary to avoid shrinking the consumer pool while the pressure to consolidate may intensify. Intriguingly, global rights deals may become more likely.

Broadcast TV viewing resumed its downwards trajectory in 2021, following a pandemic-inflated boost in 2020. The effect has been compounded by streaming services retaining much of their lockdown gains, consolidating their place at the heart of people's viewing habits

Within the shrinking pie of broadcast TV viewing—still c.70% of total TV set use—the PSBs have held relatively steady, whilst Channel 5 has increased both its share and absolute volume of viewing

However, further decline seems inevitable, with the largest components of the programming landscape, namely longstanding formats and the soaps suffering badly since the beginning of the pandemic. We await the effect of various new scheduling strategies

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.

Alongside freezing the licence fee for the next two years, the government made it clear that it believes the fee is no longer the optimal mechanism to fund the BBC, demonstrating a willingness to remove it in 2028

What seems to be the government's preferred replacement, a subscription, is not ideal: there are structural issues that mean it would not be possible to have a service that all could subscribe to without a costly switchover

Furthermore, a subscription would undermine a number of tenets of public service broadcasting, most notably universality, breadth of programming and representing the diversity of Britain—naturally a subscription service would pivot to commercially efficient content that targets its subscribers and those most likely to subscribe