The metaverse is a radical expansion of online experiences— sparking a host of new safety challenges on harmful content, economic activity, and privacy.

Building safety into the metaverse will take a village: platforms and communities will set policies and moderation. Regulators could struggle to future-proof their tools, especially with decentralised platforms.

AI age verification and moderation is in a race against AI hazards: disinformation, deepfakes and dynamic user content all intensify harms in immersive settings.

In a reform of the competition regime for digital markets, by 2025 the UK will have conduct regimes for platforms including Google, Meta and Apple, overseen by the Digital Markets Unit.

Nested within could be a ‘fair bargaining’ regime for platforms and news groups, following Australia and Canada, whose lessons could be valuable to preserve platforms’ incentives to serve news. In Canada, platforms are refusing to pay to serve news links to their users, and plan to exit this form of content.

Financial transfers to UK news groups by platforms is among the new UK regime’s aims, but is unlikely to make up for the declining revenue trend of local news provision whose sustainability is most at risk.

A new era is starting for the big consumer tech companies, as they venture outside of their traditional comfort zones to bet on future growth—most obviously in AI, and then cloud, gaming, headsets and video.

Competition in the tech space is intensifying as incumbents go head-to-head in new revenue growth areas also populated by insurgent startups—their M&A watched closely by competition regulators.

Fat profit margins have ensured vast financial resources are available to pour into competition, but hitting the right targets for consumer engagement is key to success.

Piracy of live video feeds—chiefly sports—is growing due to illegal subscription ‘IPTV’ services delivered to TV sets.

Consumers discover illegal feeds through search engines and social media, and subscribe through global payment systems.

Anti-piracy activity is focused on feed disruption. There is little attention paid to credit card and online payment facilitators who need to do more.

Recent developments in AI have ignited a frenzy in the tech world and wider society. Though some predictions are closer to sci-fi, this new phase is a real advance.

We view AI as a ‘supercharger’, boosting productivity of workers. The impact is already being felt across media sectors, including advertising and publishing.

Firms thinking about using AI should assess which tasks can be augmented and what data is required. Be prepared for unpredictable outputs and a changing legal and tech landscape.

Spotify’s strategy to invest massively in podcasts weighed on its costs and chewed up its operating profits, a bad combination that led CEO Daniel Ek to admit he 'got a little carried away'.

Spotify's podcast investment did not deliver the benefit of reduced music licensing costs on the premium tier.

Podcast investments in North America have not materially altered Spotify's slower post-pandemic subscriber growth in that geography, and do not travel outside their home country as readily as music.

Three-year-old Apple TV+ is part of a broader pivot to subscription, which seeks to leverage the billion iPhone users.

Little impacted by the tech crash, Apple is increasing content spending as most of its rivals cut it.

Apple’s scripted content pitches quality over quantity, stardom over creativity. But the consumer reception has been cool.

There is a belief in some quarters that there is space for a myriad of large SVOD services in the UK. We question whether there is room for more than the current three pacesetters; Netflix, Amazon and NOW TV

Like the UK, the US market is dominated by three services, and there is evidence of an appetite for further offerings. But the US market is conspicuously different to the UK's, with the forces behind cord-cutting in the States less apparent this side of the Atlantic

Potential domestic UK services would struggle to compete with the resources—supported by debt-funded and loss-leading models—that foreign tech giants can marshal

The TV, the main screen in the house, is rapidly becoming connected to the internet, opening a new front in the battle for people's attention

Tech players, pay-TV operators, and manufacturers are all aiming to control the user interface, ad delivery and data collection, leaving incumbent broadcaster interests less well represented

To protect their position, and the principles of public service broadcasting, broadcasters will have to work with each other at home and in Europe to leverage their content and social importance

The overall scale of the GAFAN digital media giants may be huge, but the cost of becoming a major player in Premier League (PL) football remains utterly disproportionate to the current scale and ambitions of their video businesses in the UK.

Furthermore, the main package PL rights are live-only, UKonly, and of limited breadth of appeal, making a poor strategic fit for any of the digital players.

The cheaper minor packages, near-live and clips rights may be a better fit, but bidding on these will not move the needle in terms of the £1.7 billion per year main PL auction rights costs.