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Three-year-old Apple TV+ is part of a broader pivot to subscription, which seeks to leverage the billion iPhone users.
Little impacted by the tech crash, Apple is increasing content spending as most of its rivals cut it.
Apple’s scripted content pitches quality over quantity, stardom over creativity. But the consumer reception has been cool.
“They will hang together, those four kids,” says Claire Enders, a media analyst who has tracked the Murdoch empire for decades. “They don’t need the money.”
She expects the future of weak legacy assets, including the newspapers in the UK and Australia, will be the real question for the next generation. “Everyone understands how Rupert feels, but no one else is going to pay for that,” she says.
“Digital advertising is more valuable in the US,” explained Abi Watson, a media analyst at Enders Analysis. “The US is much richer.” Additionally, because the dollar has grown against the pound in recent years, American revenues have become more valuable to UK companies.
“Part of it is a numbers thing,” Watson added. “There are not going to be enough people that you are going to reach in the UK to offset the decline in newsstand sales, even if your business has subscriptions. [US expansion is] a necessity.”
Claire Enders, a media analyst who liaises with the government on broadcasting policy, argued that Channel 4 would reinvest profits made from selling shows into new content. “In a way, it would be more beneficial for Channel 4 to retain and reinvest rights than automatically give them away to producers who don’t all require that kind of assistance,” she added.
The post-pandemic recovery has lifted vacancies to a high of 1.27 million, at critical levels in hospitality and health—sectors impacted by the exodus of EU workers. We expect recruitment advertising for private sector roles to have risen 13% in 2022 to £746 million (noting base effects from lockdown in H1 2021), and will decline c.4% in 2023.
LinkedIn dominates recruitment advertising directed at professionals, leveraging its free global networking service. Indeed anchors the other end of the skills spectrum, which is low value and high volume, aggregating openings to create a scale proposition for jobseekers, using technology to target and match them with employers.
Specialists are surviving Indeed’s technology-driven business model by relying on human expertise and ancillary HR services to differentiate. Agencies continue to specialise in supplying workers to large employers for temporary positions. News publishers have retained a small but dwindling slice of recruitment advertising.
Telcos are pressing the EU to force big tech to make a ‘fair contribution’ to their network costs, although this has drawn opposition from telecoms regulators, who rightly fear risks to the wider ecosystem
There are valid concerns to address however, with content providers not currently incentivised to deliver traffic efficiently, and telcos constrained by net neutrality rules from doing anything about it, resulting in unnecessary costs and service degradation
However, there may be better ways to address these, through reforming the implementation of existing rules to encourage more efficient content delivery, and allowing the telcos to provide enhanced delivery routes of their own, with Ofcom’s approach in the UK a step in this direction, but perhaps not a step far enough
In a transformative upgrade of its content subscription offering, Google is buying the rights to live Sunday NFL games for $2 billion per year for 2023-2031.
YouTube can leverage its massive reach to challenge existing video aggregators, including pay-TV platforms and Amazon, as a gatekeeper to consumers.
Google will likely deploy a similar strategy in Europe, eventually competing with Sky, Canal+ and other incumbents—a hopeful development for football leagues.
Amazon, NBCUniversal, Disney and Discovery have all announced their own ventures in so-called t-commerce, but experts aren’t convinced any of this tech is going to pay for streamers' own programme shopping. “These are all pretty niche opportunities – normal product placement is a nice addition to have, but it hardly drives the businesses of studios or broadcasters,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “This technology feasibly extends that segment a bit but doesn't really combat the real limitations – which are regulation and the audience's tolerance for product placement.”
“That’s not happening,” said media analyst Claire Enders, of Britain’s Enders Analysis. “The WSJ is the core asset of News Corp.”