“The cash injection opens up the opportunity to acquire some of the largest alt-nets in the market, but also potentially wade in on the pending and industry-defining Nexfibre/Netomnia deal,” Karen Egan, analyst at Enders Analysis, said.

CityFibre had been in talks to buy Netomnia before the Nexfibre agreement.

The company could target other, smaller alt-nets such as Community Fibre Ltd or Hyperoptic Ltd. to reach its goal of connecting another 3 million homes, she added. Netomnia, which has more connections to premises, would help reach that goal quicker, she said.

Analysts at Enders Analysis said the key competition question would be whether regulators continue to treat television advertising as a standalone market or reflect growing competition from YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Meta and other digital platforms.

They argued a broadcaster-only definition is now “anachronistic” given the shift in advertising spending towards online platforms.

For viewers, the alternatives on the table all have different pros and cons. “A subscription BBC would not work,” says Niamh Burns, Senior Media Analyst at Enders Analysis. She says that 80 per cent of households would need to voluntarily sign up to maintain the BBC’s current income, a market rate that has never been seen in the UK, with Netflix only at 60 per cent.

“If that can’t be achieved, and realistically it can’t, the only options are either a much higher price than the current licence fee, or a much smaller BBC.”

The week kicked off with an op-ed by Professional Publishers Association (PPA) CEO Sajeeda Merali. Referencing a recent report by Enders Analysis, Merali declared it pertinent for publishers to move beyond trying to drive scale.

It is something of a puzzler. “You can’t just go: ‘Why this is happening is because X.’ It’s a bunch of things,” Tom Harrington, head of TV at research outfit Enders Analysis, tells me. “Some of the shows might just be bad. Some of it might just be they came out at a time when there was another, better show on somewhere else, or [elsewhere] on Netflix.”

And to be fair to Netflix, this is not just an issue with which it contends. All of its rivals have to deal with what Harrington calls the “natural attrition” of falling viewer numbers as a series progresses. “Every TV show, bar a few, loses viewers – that’s the gravity of TV,” he says.

In the UK, for example, the BBC partnered with the YouTube collective Sidemen to simultaneously broadcast the Ecuador vs. Germany match on their YouTube channels. This initiative illustrates the importance that traditional broadcasters place on their digital partners.

But "at this stage, it looks more like a test than a real structural change," says Ben Woods, a specialist in "creator economy" issues at Enders Analysis, the UK's leading media and telecom research and consulting firm.

According to him, these alliances complement existing agreements rather than replacing them. "It's simply an extension to allow rights holders to reach a younger audience."

Claire Holubowskyj, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis made the point that Reddit’s business is less vulnerable to AI disintermediation than platforms built around identity-based targeting.

“Reddit’s use of interest-based rather than identity-based targeting flattens the differences in value between frequent and non-frequent users compared to other platforms,” she said. “While the ad impressions that ChatGPT disintermediates will be more valuable for Reddit than for identity-based advertisers, Reddit’s interest-based product is well-placed to capitalize on any high-intent non-logged-in traffic funnelled through by ChatGPT.” 

The challenger networks had accumulated an aggregated £9.3 billion debt, according to estimates by Enders Analysis, hit by higher financing costs. 

“I’m sure that Vodafone will see some opportunities here,” said Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis. “But there will be nervousness too.”