Apple is strengthening its household model by doubling down on family-friendly content subscriptions and payments

The model is reliant on hard bargains with mainly US partners, which risks sacrificing potential scale for a short-term boost in margin dollars

The new services offer glimpses of novel concepts, but stop short of taking risks to truly differentiate—a problem in TV, where Apple’s distribution advantage is slimmer than Oprah would have it

With the UK perhaps Netflix’s most valuable market outside the US—home to a stellar production sector—the streaming service is escalating its foray into local production, opening a content hub in London and moving from co-productions to direct commissions

As UK content completely dominates UK video viewing outside of the SVODs, to expand subscription reach Netflix is endeavouring to become an alternative to the PSBs’ entertainment output; this local spend is efficient given the universality and worldwide appetite for British content

With a growing proportion of local content expenditure now coming from Netflix and other SVODs, there are ramifications for both broadcasters and producers—loss of viewing, potential market pressure, increased competition for premium content and hesitancy around their own SVOD plans—along with implications for the cultural landscape

­­­­

Amazon’s recent deals with Apple in TV, music and device sales mark a turning point after a decade of frosty relations

The context for this involves shifting priorities at both firms, growing pressure on Apple’s iPhone business, and rivals in common — first and foremost Google, but also the likes of Netflix and Spotify

The uneasy alliance helps both companies consolidate their strengths in the platform competition over media and the connected home — but trouble already brews

Apple has fulfilled its promise to roll out innovative new products this year, launching Apple Watch into the nascent wearables market and Apple Pay, a new mobile payments service, as well as moving the iPhone into ‘phablet’ territory.

The larger-screened 6 and 6 Plus should revive growth in iPhone sales and ASP, as well as providing another variable to compete in the mid-tier handset segment; Apple Pay further enhances Apple’s lock on its customer base.

Apple Watch’s likely impact is harder to discern; to date sales of smartwatches have been lacklustre but although Apple’s offering is the most commercially viable yet, it still feels like a solution in need of a problem.

Amazon has entered the increasingly crowded digital entertainment TV device marketplace, one which could be strategically more important for the ecommerce giant than tech rivals Apple and Google

The frictionless integration of entertainment and ecommerce on TV represents a bigger consumer milestone than competitor services are offering, and Amazon’s brand has huge appeal, though at present it has less market traction for streaming than it does for other products

Content owners and broadcasters remain the real TV gatekeepers, with integration of TV and digital a service-level pipe dream for now, and so Amazon will likely have to accept being one of many, rather than the runaway winner as it is in books

Explosive growth in take-up of smartphones and tablets means that the effective size of the internet will increase by several multiples within the next few years. This transformation in scale comes with a major change in character and operating dynamics, creating new opportunities and revenue streams.

Twitter is unique amongst social apps: it gives new users a blank canvas in which they can (and must) create their own social network reflecting their own interests, hence building an ‘Interest Graph’, but onboarding new users remains a challenge.

Revenue at Twitter is now on a $600 million annual run-rate, scaling rapidly since the introduction of ‘native ads’, and seems set for further growth: the key question is whether it can achieve breakout user growth and mass market scale.