Digital Music Downloads

Content piracy has transformed over the last twelve months into a hyper-scale cyber threat making the risk to even the one-time consumer of pirated video real and increasing. By hijacking devices throughout the home using buried malware known as residential proxies, criminal and other threat actors use pirate content services largely as a key to unlock home networks for their illicit activities.

Over 50% of piracy apps and streaming devices are estimated to contain ResProxy malware, with recent samples tracking even higher.

ResProxy is effectively a runaway cyberweapon as threat actors compete to exploit a newly revealed “democratisation” capability to take over herds of devices. Consumers face grim prospects. Cyber disasters at scale, previously only imagined in Hollywood movies, could be next.

Broadcasters accept the need to ‘meet audiences where they are’ on video-sharing and social/entertainment platforms. In practice this means full episodes where they think viewing is likely incremental, as well as multi-format ‘fandom-building’ content strategies arranged around core IP.

Thriving on platforms requires playing by platform rules. There are sophisticated strategies emerging that straddle marketing and the monetisable distribution of new formats. 

For most, this activity remains fundamentally secondary and supplemental to core offerings. There are concerns around the ability to fund the kind of premium content broadcasters and traditional studios produce via digital platforms, without entirely reconfiguring what it is they do.

BT hit its FY26 guidance with a particularly strong Q4 financial performance, which was buoyed by a number of one-offs.

Operating metrics were far from spectacular, but the company is outperforming its peers in tough markets, and Openreach’s line losses are on a clear (if potentially bumpy) downwards trend as altnet growth wanes.

Improving cashflows will still take some years to translate into rapid growth in shareholder returns given a conservative dividend policy, but the path is looking increasingly secure.