The German football league has suspended its media rights auction after protests by DAZN over the award of the top package.
DAZN surprised the market by aiming to become the Bundesliga’s primary broadcaster.
The situation in Germany reveals the contradictory impulses weighing on leagues at rights auctions.
Big news publishers are pursuing licensing deals with AI companies, chiefly OpenAI. Not all publishers will see a substantial return; while some news may be important for training AI models, not all publisher content will be.
Litigation is a threat point when negotiations stall (see the New York Times), but the copyright status of Large Language Models (LLMs) is uncertain. In the UK, there has been no government intervention (on copyright or otherwise) that could facilitate licensing.
Publishers’ bargaining position is strongest when it comes to up-to-date material that could be important in powering some AI consumer products. They should seek deals to support their journalism, while bearing in mind the risk that new products may get between them and their readers.
The German football league’s rights tender for its 2025-29 cycle is designed to create competitive tension between Sky and DAZN.
Based on precedents and public statements, we would expect Sky to increase coverage and DAZN to scale it down without a head-on bidding battle.
With low international potential, the Bundesliga can only count on its deep fan base to meet competitive pressure from the Premier League.
Recent advances in 'Artificial Intelligence' have generated excitement, investment and improved valuations, on the plausible promise of greater efficiency in a range of areas, such as health and coding.
It is still not clear who will profit from this boom. Currently chip-maker NVIDIA is cleaning up, propelled by sales to model developers, also driving demand for cloud computing services.
Leverage in the AI value chain depends on differentiation and barriers to entry, which are high in the chips industry. AI services like chatbots have much lower barriers to entry, while deeper vertical integration of more stages of the value chain could shake things up.
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.
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.
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
The push for accelerated subscriber acquisition has stalled Sky Deutschland’s underlying growth in profits as promotions have undermined ARPU.
After being artificially suppressed by the introduction of two-year contracts, churn is poised to rise. Sky could maintain subscriber growth only through increased marketing and discounting – but this is unlikely.
We expect EBIT breakeven before the end of the current Bundesliga contract in 2017. But sustained profitability depends on the outcome of the rights auction to be held next spring.
News Corp’s original bid for full ownership of BSkyB was withdrawn because of the phone hacking scandal. It was never blocked by regulators. Had it not been for the scandal, the bid would almost certainly have been approved.
With the phone hacking scandal fallout largely over and the election of a friendly government, the climate is now much more favourable to a renewed bid. With undertakings, we believe it would be approved by regulators.
The increasingly global scale of TV and film distribution means the commercial case for the bid is, if anything, stronger now than in 2010. The questions are simply whether the right price can be agreed, and how high up it is on James Murdoch’s list of priorities.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Mobile World Congress (MWC) saw major announcements in virtual reality and new generation streaming game consoles, as well as further opening up of access to game engine software
Latest earnings reports show that major publishers and developers are currently in buoyant form as growth in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One install base boosts revenue and consumers migrate to digital sales
Results for developers dependent on the mobile or online ecosystem are more mixed: King (producer of Candy Crush) continues to grow, but Zynga is struggling, although recent performance hints at a possible halt in its decline