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.
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.
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.
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.
2013 has seen yet another year of strong growth in consumer adoption of mobile devices and screens adding to the challenges facing traditional media. Press and radio have long been affected, but television is now starting to feel the heat
BT and Sky’s contest for premium pay-TV sports rights has intensified. August saw the launch of BT Sport, while BT’s acquisition of the European football rights in November was a clear statement of intent, spending half of Channel 4’s total programming budget on approx. 200 hours of content
The UK has seen buoyant advertising growth of around 4% in 2013, with similar growth expected in 2014, in the context of the strongest economic recovery in Europe
Apple’s two new iPhones both secure its grip on the high end (for now) and extend a cautious toe into (slightly) cheaper waters. They will not deliver a step change in global sales growth, but should deliver solid performance
9m unit sales at launch are impressive, but 200m updates to iOS 7 (double last year’s figure) point to the continuing strength of Apple’s ecosystem and its ability to deploy innovative new features
We continue to believe there is room in Apple’s portfolio for a $350-$450 phone without weakening Apple’s quality of experience or brand positioning, but this is clearly now off the agenda for another year
A cheaper iPhone has been discussed almost since the original launch in 2007, but we believe costs have fallen and the market developed to the point that it now makes sense for Apple to offer a $200-$300 (unsubsidised) model.
We see a positive but fairly small financial impact on Apple. The key benefit would be defensive: by extending the ecosystem and preserving iOS as developers’ first choice, Apple would secure the whole portfolio.
We believe a well-executed and distributed $200-$300 iPhone would sell double-digit millions of units – a significant challenge to Android OEMs and Google. However, the US market’s pricing structure might limit the impact there.
By the end of 2013 there will be more iOS and Android devices in use than PCs. Google is using Plus and Android to reposition itself to take advantage of this, extending its reach and capturing far more behavioural data
We believe a helpful way to look at Google is as a vast machine learning project: mobile will feed the machine with far more data, making the barriers to entry in search and adjacent fields even higher
For Google, Apple’s iOS is primarily another place to get reach: we see limited existential conflict between the two. However, mobile use models remain in flux, with apps and mobile social challenging Google’s grip on data collection
Apple’s iTunes will add free-to-the-user online and mobile radio to the platform in the autumn of 2013, meshing music purchase with enhanced tools for discovery.
iTunes Radio also meshes with Match, the cloud-based music storage and retrieval utility sold for $24.99/year, whose users will enjoy ad-free online and mobile radio.
The main casualty of iTunes Radio is likely to be #1 US internet station Pandora, which this week launched the next phase of its battle to win the better royalty terms of commercial radio.