Football leagues must think innovatively about maintaining broad exposure, but relying on advertising revenues from free-to-air TV makes no economic sense.
Creating league-operated direct-to-consumer platforms would undermine the very competition between broadcasters that has propelled rights.
The only realistic option for sustainable growth is deeper, longer-term partnerships with broadcasters.
The US is intent on preventing the CCP’s goal of AI supremacy by 2030, banning exports of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies. So far, these bans have largely been shrugged off to create a new commercial dynamic in the region.
Huawei wields a de facto monopoly on the manufacture and sale of advanced chips in China. Huawei also sells cloud services globally and threatens Apple's $70 billion in Chinese revenues through its premium handsets.
China’s AI regulation is highly supportive of the training and deployment of Chinese-language LLMs developed by tech platforms, startups, and device makers, with meaningful revenue gains only appearing by H2 2024.
Streaming profitability beckons, but owes much to the profitable services folded into companies’ DTC segments alongside the headline streamers.
There is a broader move towards bundling and price rises. The former bolsters subscriber additions and lifetime value but is ARPU-dilutive, while price rises will bump up both ARPU and churn.
2024 marks the first year with multiple players at scale in the ad space, as Prime Video entered the market. Other streamers with high CPMs and lower scale may be forced to re-examine their offerings.
Device makers regained their mojo at this year’s MWC, with phones a crucial route to generative AI becoming a daily habit.
AI software has improved and proliferated, but limited differentiation leaves room for consolidation as a competitive funding crunch looms.
Unanswered questions loom large, but won't dim AI's potential.
Meta's China risk is overstated: the spend from Chinese advertisers is diverse and resilient to everything short of a full-blown trade war.
Apple (and Tesla) are in the more precarious position of selling directly in-market, and face sharpening domestic competition.
Amazon's exit from selling in China still leaves it exposed: its marketplace strategy is built on Chinese sellers, whose potential routes to market are proliferating with local platforms going global.
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 Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) delivered its Web IV ruling on statutory SoundExchange licensing rates for webcasters for 2016-20, raising Pandora’s total music royalty costs by a forecast 12% in 2016
Had the CRB sided with SoundExchange, rates for Pandora’s non-subscription tier would have shot up 79%, leaving the company floundering in a sea of red ink
Nevertheless, these increased licensing costs for Pandora over 2016-20 will postpone the moment when the company attains net profitability
UKTV has continued its strong audience performance throughout 2015, and with Dave and Drama the company now has the two largest channels outside the PSBs
Growth has been driven by the effective use of the DTT platform with UKTV positioning its DTT channels to take advantage of the platform’s audience profile and sheer volume of viewing
Assuming UKTV maintains its commissioning spend we expect continued growth on free-to-air, but question marks remain on some of its more niche pay-TV channels
This year marked the second annual IABUK Digital Upfronts. As well as Facebook, Google/YouTube, Aol, Yahoo!, Twitter, BuzzFeed, Vice and others, several traditional media companies – Sky, The Guardian and Global Radio – participated, reflecting the rising importance of digital media and digital media buyers to their businesses
Many of the pitches were informed by the key shifts in online content: it is increasingly cross platform, driven by mobile devices and focused on video programming, and these formed the main themes of the event
A key piece of context is the rise of social media and the shift to programmatic buying, which continue to driven down pricing for all but the most valuable inventory – audience scale, high value audiences and premium content have never been more essential
Apple’s results underlined its status as the tech industry’s biggest and most profitable company due to the iPhone, accounting for two thirds of the company’s revenue and capturing three quarters of all smartphone profits
While the iPhone dominates the $500+ handset market, the question is how will this segment develop as smartphone penetration approaches maturity in developed markets and mobile operators restructure handset subsidies
The shift to separate airtime and device plans could increase consumer price sensitivity, but leasing plans with annual replacement, supported by the iPhone’s strong second hand value, bring the opportunity of faster replacement cycles, with upside and downside risks matched