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.
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.
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.
The temporary cool-off in hype around VR following a very buzzy 2016 is not reducing the flow of investment and talent into the industry, notably in video production utilising 360Video technology; setting the stage for the development of a truly new entertainment medium
Fully immersive interactive worlds will continue to be the mainstay of the video games industry, while video entertainment will exist in a multi-track environment, with some genres (news, documentaries , natural history) making 360Video mainstream well before long-form narrative-driven entertainment
2017 will still be a challenging year for consumer device VR roll-out and mass market adoption; Oculus, Google, and Sony continue to seed the market, providing large scale funding and equipment directly to developers and content producers