The games industry enjoyed a robust 2020, with the pandemic creating high demand across titles and platforms. Now a core part of the mainstream media and entertainment ecosystem, games share of entertainment spend and audience viewing time will maintain momentum and increase in 2021.

The demand for, and value of, premium content has migrated to game IP, with top franchises driving increased M&A activity and tighter integration with film and TV output, and providing an important advertising channel.

The pandemic has provided breathing space for the industry on regulatory scrutiny of revenue models, and overall consumer safety. Regulators need to increase their speed in 2021, and act decisively on predatory ‘free-to-play’ game mechanisms.

Apple reported record revenue and profit in its fiscal Q1, with iPhone sales making a positive contribution on a trailing 12-month basis for the first time since 2018.

Services are a vital part of the growth strategy, and should be extremely profitable.

However, Apple’s services strategy is at the sharp end of regulatory concerns about gatekeeping platforms.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year was held virtually, with announcements revolving almost exclusively around the pandemic and addressing changing consumer needs. The evolving use of tech at home was a particular focus for brands as consumers are now demanding more of their homes than ever before.

Following a record 2020, ecommerce was a topic that garnered a lot of attention, with retailers emphasising the importance of a consumer centric 'digital first' strategy, accepting the fact that ecommerce is going to be bigger than it ever has been.

Amid increased tech use at home, moves to ban third-party cookies and impending regulatory changes to data collection in the US, the conversation around data and privacy was more prominent than ever before. First-party data is going to be more valuable, even if tracking restrictions limit what can be done with that data.

Steep declines in CD sales in major recorded music markets continued in 2009 as we had forecast last year (Recorded Music and Music Publishing [2008-39])

Sales of recorded music continue to be decimated by physical and online piracy, plus the disintermediation of the album purchase by the digital purchase of ‘cherry-picked’ tracks

A further knock-on effect on CD sales is the reduction in retailers’ shelf space devoted to music, including as a result of the bankruptcies of major chains (Circuit City, Woolworths and Zavvi) – what we have called the ‘perfect storm’ for the CD

The iPhone has inspired all the major Smartphone makers to launch touchscreen models, and dramatically improve the usability of their interfaces. The iPhone itself remains the most easily usable touchscreen handset in our view, although at the cost of speed of use and adaptability

Unfortunately, the characteristics that make these handsets easier to surf the internet with – large screens and/or QWERTY keyboards – are just the characteristics that are unlikely to trickle down into mass market handset models, meaning that the impact on mobile data usage is limited

We continue to believe that web browsing is unlikely to be popular on mass market handsets for the foreseeable future, but usage of web services can be popularised by more of a widget approach, which the cheap but smart INQ1 handset demonstrates well

Major record labels will allow iTunes to sell all its music stripped of digital rights management (DRM), removing a barrier to digital music buying, while iTunes will introduce in April the tiered pricing the industry wants

We expect no real bounce in demand, however, as Apple’s DRM was not a restriction for iTunes customers as most owned iPods, the dominant music player in a market which is almost fully matured – we expect few iPod customers to pay to upgrade their libraries to DRM-free

News of peace breaking out between iTunes and the recorded music industry was overshadowed by reports of the continued steep decline in CD volumes sold in the US market, down almost by one fifth in 2008 from 2007, with digital increases again failing to offset the decline