Homepage

Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch, a platform for watching and broadcasting live streams of video gameplay, provides the ecommerce giant access to a large, fast growing and highly engaged gaming audience.

Like other media, retailing of games is in a state of transition away from physical media, where Amazon is more dominant, to digital, where Amazon is one player among many; this acquisition echoes those Amazon has made in other media.

Twitch looks set to be a successful business in its own right, arguably reason enough to buy it; more importantly it offers valuable consumer behaviour data, as well as technology and platform benefits, and enhances Amazon’s increasingly ambitious customer proposition.

After a relatively benign year in 2013 for UK recorded music thanks to a small pickup in trade revenues, we project a 5% decline in 2014, with digital music purchasing now falling as consumers shift to ad-supported and subscription access services, while CD sales continue to drop at a double-digit pace each year.

The UK reached a new milestone at the end of 2013 surpassing 1.3 million paying subscribers, a large number of non-paying 'hard bundled' subscribers on Orange/Deezer and Vodafone/Spotify 4G plans, plus several million Spotify freemium and Spotify Free 'smart radio' users.

We project steady expenditure on recorded music as a whole in the period to 2017 from consumers and advertisers at £1.1 billion annually, but anticipate the loss of £90 million in trade revenues in the shift to access due to the labels' lower revenue-share.

Older adults have always watched more TV than younger adults, and even more TV news. The gap has widened over the last five years following the rapid rise in online news consumption via websites or apps among the under 35s, where online is now used as widely as TV for getting news.

Recently published survey data by Ofcom (UK) and Reuters (10 countries) highlight the importance of online as a tool for accessing breaking news, whether search engines, news websites or social networks, along with an expanding field of news content.

Online, with its emphasis on reading rather than watching news stories is no direct substitute for TV. The BBC is by a large margin the most widely accessed online source in the UK, while the challenge for the other TV news providers is to develop commercial models that successfully integrate broadcast with online.

Market revenue growth in the UK residential communications sector continued to be robust in Q2 2014 at 5.4%, a slight increase on the previous quarter, with continued volume growth and firm pricing countering weak call volumes and the negative impact of a VAT legislation change hitting Virgin Media and TalkTalk

BT was the fastest growing out of the ‘big four’ in revenue terms in Q2 even after the direct revenue impact of BT Sport is excluded, a remarkable turnaround after being in last place a year ago, driven by both volume and ARPU growth continuing to accelerate, with fibre helping both

Since the end of Q2, promotional activity has already intensified, particularly from BT and Sky around the start of the new football season, and churn is likely to be under more pressure at all of the operators, although the disruption is likely to be less severe than that experienced around the launch of BT Sport last year, and we expect all of the major players to continue to grow in net terms

The appearance of mass market consumer eBooks was delayed, evolved explosively, and has since plateaued more quickly than other media. Physical books are attractive objects and elegant devices compared to CDs and DVDs.

Furthermore, “all you can eat” is not a reader’s mindset, limiting the relevance and growth of mass market eBook subscription services.

Amazon’s mission is to grow market share, and strategic initiatives to move up the supply chain into publishing do not address its core issue: digital provides a poor discovery solution for dedicated book lovers, hence the continued necessity of retailers for publishers.

Consolidation in US and European TMT and the rapid expansion of digital giants is creating increasing pressure on the media companies who have to negotiate with them.

In Time Warner, 21st Century Fox identified an acquisition that would give it invaluable global premium content and distribution assets, and the ability to outbid its main rivals in upcoming sports rights auctions. The benefits for Time Warner were less discernible.

The bid was pulled after Time Warner’s management signalled they weren’t interested, and investors reacted with share price movements that helped preclude the bid in the near-term. But consolidation amongst media companies will only make more sense in the years to come.