Viewed through this lens, RTL’s tie-up with Sky Deutschland looks more consequential. As François Godard, Media and Telecoms Analyst at Enders Analysis, has previouslt told VideoWeek, the deal roughly doubles RTL’s size in Germany, representing a massive shift in the German TV market.
In early March, OpenAI pulled back from Instant Checkout, a plan in which consumers would shop for goods directly inside ChatGPT. This was after a five-month trial in which the company appears to have found that building a successful commerce platform is harder than it looks. “Like many of OpenAI’s initial launches, it felt more like a public demo of what the tech could do than a very sustained effort to set up a commerce business,” said Niamh Burns, an analyst at Enders.
Then, last week, it ditched Sora, its viedo-generation platform, and with it a $1bn deal in which Disney was going to license OpenAI-generated content to “unlock new possibilities in imaginative storytelling”. This was strategic for OpenAI, because Sora was a money pit. It was awkward for Disney, which reportedly learned that the platform would be axed an hour before the public did.
François Godard of Enders Analysis wonders how YouTube’s role might expand at future editions of the World Cup.
“I don’t see any major conflict of interest between broadcasters carrying full games and social media carrying clips. However, clearly, this is a first step for YouTube. I could very easily imagine them bidding for live rights to full games . . . It is a worrying warning sign for traditional TV broadcasters,” he said.
Matt Brittin has no direct experience in news and television. But he has joined the board of the British daily newspaper "The Guardian." "He created the Google Showcase service, which has provided significant financial support to many media outlets. He understands the importance of media pluralism," says Claire Enders of the Enders research firm. "He is a leader who can contribute a great deal to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) [the association of European public broadcasters, including France Télévisions and Radio France]," she adds.
YouTube is after “one-off events that shows that ‘youtube’ is TV, that change expectation from viewers and advertisers,” says media analyst Francois Godard of Enders Analysis.
Enders Analysis, the research firm, described the collapse of the Sora agreement as “a brutal lesson in the perils of licensing in an emerging technology sector with clear ‘deal fever’.”
Given Brittin’s CV, Claire Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis, said it was a coup for the BBC and he would have the respect of government.
“It’s quite extraordinary to have someone of that stature who has no necessity whatsoever for status,” she said. “He’s a very thoughtful and calm person who would never have applied if he hadn’t considered this deeply. I think there is an element of real public-spiritedness.
“It is very brave for someone to step into that kind of 24/7 position.”
“I think we are extraordinarily fortunate to have attracted a person of that calibre to what is a national and global institution of enormous importance in a world at war,” says Claire Enders, the founder of research company Enders Analysis. “Success for him will not be about growth, but about strategy and strength, and making a difference by shaping the news available to all for the better, here and elsewhere; that is a very big task, particularly with the financial burdens of the BBC.”
The injection of commercial and tech sensibility would be timely for the BBC, according to Claire Enders, founder of research firm Enders Analysis and a British media veteran.
“He is level-headed and will choose his battles wisely,” she said. “Someone new will be more respected by the board than someone they’ve been kicking around for ages.”
Enders, the media analyst, sees Brittin’s tech wealth as a good thing for the BBC. “He’s also a businessman who doesn’t need to do this for the money. He’s doing it for the public good of our country,” she said. “It’s not a job for which people are going to thank you.”
