TikTok has been dealt a devastating blow as a US bill has been signed into law forcing owner ByteDance to sell within a year or face its removal from app stores. 

The stakes are higher than in 2020—China's opposition to a divestment will make an optimal sale harder to conclude, so all sides must be prepared for a ban.   

The TikTok bill introduces extraordinary new powers in the context of the US and China's broad systemic rivalry, though online consumer benefits will be limited.  

Sony PlayStation’s next CEO will have hard decisions to make: compete against a resurgent multiplatform Microsoft, or retreat and defend an increasingly rickety PlayStation console model.

New gaming hardware will have an outsize influence in the year ahead, giving gamers unprecedented choice, starting with XR headsets and continuing to a likely new Nintendo Switch.

YouTube’s foray into browser-based games will be the service to watch in 2024. If successful, streaming services, including Netflix, will be on track to become heavyweight game platforms.

The value of the domestic rights of major European leagues is falling due to the declining competitive intensity between broadcasters.

The Premier League’s new rights deal extends its lead, while Serie A faces a 10% fall in revenue next season and Ligue 1 struggles to get a flat fee.

Sky and DAZN have cemented their status as Europe’s top football broadcasters. Amazon has refocused to one game per week.

This report explores and quantifies expenditure in the local media landscape. Flat disposable income and the rise in e-commerce continue to force many retailers from the high street, though we argue first-rate small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have the opportunity to grow share of the local market, despite these pressures

Technology has radically disrupted the way local businesses reach out to consumers. Not only has advertising expenditure moved online, but SME spend is dissipating into other activities, including distribution and platform developments, PR, social and sponsorship activities and live events

The rise of smartphones has created the tantalising prospect of a perfect local media solution. We assess the level of opportunity for Google, Facebook, Hibu, local newspapers, local radio, local TV and hyperlocal organisations

Keen to reposition itself as a media conglomerate, Vivendi is considering merging SFR with private equity-owned Numericable and its B2B sister Completel, while reducing its stake in the new entity to below 50%.

Sizeable savings would come from migrating SFR’s fixed line subscribers in urban areas from Orange’s copper network to Numericable’s coax and FTTB, and from eliminating Completel’s LLU network and Numericable’s marketing spend.

In the short term, execution would be challenging and require sizeable capex. In the longer run, coax is a much cheaper alternative to investing in FTTH. The merger would put pressure on the other two altnets, Iliad and Bouygues, to consider consolidation scenarios.

The last of our four reports on specialist advertising focuses on business directories, probably the most rapidly changing marketplace of them all

The transition from listings to marketing services seems to be unfolding as quickly as the transition from print listings to digital listings that preceded it

While listings advertising expenditure is collapsing, the 'marketplace' for local business communications is expanding and being competed for by a much wider range of businesses. Hibu (Yell) has positioned itself well as a '360 degree' solution

This report contains our annual assessment and forecasts for recorded music, in the context, as always, of the implacable physical-to-digital transition in music consumption and purchase, which continues to drain the topline of the recorded music industry.

Although 2011 was another year of decline in global recorded music retail sales, these fell just 4% in 2011 compared to 10% in the previous year, on a strong year for the album in the top markets, notably Adele’s 21 album.

Globally, the CD remains the recorded music industry’s leading sales format – accounting for the majority of retail sales in 2011. Despite brisk retail sales of download to own (DTO) tracks and albums, and encouraging sales of subscriptions in 2011, sales of mobile formats (ringtones, ringbacks, tracks) have been in decline since the peak in 2008. This gives urgency to the industry’s successful transition to digital music purchase in their top markets.

Much of the consumption of recorded music is free-to-the user, whether licensed, already purchased or pirated. Live streaming is the top music behaviour, shifting from the computer to the handset via adoption of smartphones and the free apps offered on the iTunes and Google Play storefronts, amongst others. Pandora is the emblematic supplier of ‘smart radio’, and dominates this segment in the US. Smartphone adoption is also driving subscriptions to the premium mobile tier of Spotify, Rhapsody and similar services.

The centre of digital music purchase remains the download-to-own (DTO) track or album, which we estimate accounted for $4.8 billion of retail sales in 2011, roughly 10 times the level of subscription revenues. Apple has built an unassailable lead on the DTO segment, leveraging the ecosystem created for its devices.

It is well known that piracy drains the creative industries of retail sales, although the precise interaction between piracy and foregone sales is difficult to pin down. Anti-piracy regimes are being established to combat digital piracy of cultural goods, including music, but effective implementation is slow.

Our forecasts for recorded music sales do not factor in any uplift to retail sales from successful anti-piracy action. We expect retail sales of digital formats to surpass the CD by 2015, more or less stabilising the market’s topline revenues. However, sales of around $16.5 billion by that time would be just a fraction of their 2005 level of $30 billion.

France’s Orange Sport closed last month after France Télécom declined to bid for a renewal of its four-year licence to broadcast Ligue 1 football. The future of its sister film channel, Orange Cinéma Séries, remains unclear.

The strategic aim for Orange Sport was confused from the start – standalone profit centre or loss leader, fully fledged alternative to Canal+ or add-on to it.

Orange’s premium TV project was a failure: we estimate its cumulative losses at €1.2 billion, while Orange’s broadband market share and retail price premium shrank during the four years of its operation. But it did arguably strengthen Orange’s hand in carriage negotiations with Canal+.

In this report we show our analysis of trends in UK broadband and telephony to March 2012, based on the published results of the major service providers.

Highlights for the March quarter include broadband subscriptions exceeding 21 million, a sudden uptick in broadband market net additions and local loop unbundling accounting for a record 40% of broadband subscriptions. The proportion of unbundled lines that are fully unbundled exceeded two thirds for the first time.

This quarter we also include a look at pricing, including prices for high speed broadband that show how BT Retail is using high speed broadband to reduce the price advantage of its competitors.

US music publishers have reached agreement on rolling over the mechanical royalties due on sales of digital and physical music formats for 2013-17

The expanded scope of the statute to cover ‘scan and match’ cloud locker services, such as Apple’s iTunes Match, provides incremental revenues to music publishers; the unlicensed ‘storage’ cloud locker services are not concerned

ASCAP’s agreement on US radio performance royalties will however reduce music publisher revenues