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.

The Premier League has launched its first competitive rights auction since 2018, offering broadcasters a longer four-year cycle and 70 more live games.

Sky could reduce costs by cutting down on one weekly slot, but we expect it to fight for four packages, consistent with its history of prioritising the prominence of its Premier League coverage.

Competitive tension may be the strongest between TNT Sports and DAZN.

Paid sharing and "price optimisation" are returning clear benefits for Netflix, with healthy subscriber growth (+8.8 million, up to 247 million) and an 8% YoY increase in revenue ($8.5 billion) in Q3. However, success of the advertising tier remains slow

In the UK, Netflix is growing revenues and ARPU, and although it is now a challenge to grow the subscriber base, there is a clear and large group of non-paying users that are now being targeted 

Netflix's per household engagement is materially higher than its direct competitors. However, this is plateauing and has implications for revenue levers such as advertising impacts and price rises

YouTube has just introduced Primetime Channels in the UK, following launches in the US and Germany, becoming another video-content aggregator in a crowded market.

The US has carried YouTube's subscription revenue boom—layering on a premium video marketplace in the UK may prove harder to achieve.

Google's NFL Sunday Ticket package offers exclusive, high-end content to US consumers. Primetime Channels' UK launch just a few weeks before the Premier League auction is interesting timing, but will not change the game.

Ligue 1 wants to break with its recent history of failed tenders, declining revenues and soured relations with incumbent Canal+.

This year’s would-be bidders have no history of inflating rights costs. Thanks to its distribution deals with DAZN (likely to step in) and beIN, Canal+ may feel secure, while Amazon could let its coverage shrink to a selection of key matches.

The LFP is taking steps to offer a more enticing competition, in partnership with CVC: with fewer teams, a stronger brand and new investors.

Despite its scale, YouTube can get overlooked. But its tremendous reach and impact across all demographics make it the internet's universal service provider. 

YouTube is still the golden child for creators who want to make a living from their content. For YouTube, this broad base of suppliers ensures a position of strength from which to claim a large revenue share. 

Competition from TikTok took some of the shine off YouTube's usage, and forced it promote lower-monetising Shorts. YouTube is pushing heavily into subscriptions, TV sets, and premium content via sports rights to boost the money it makes per minute spent. 

After a period of stagnation, many of the core business lines at the US tech mega-caps are back to posting respectable growth figures. The rest of the year will bed in strong revenue growth.

However, the sector is still facing a transition to new priorities. Core business strength should allow firms to shift from cost-cutting to the investment needed to fight the more competitive era they are facing.

AI is the number one focus, but the market for AI tools themselves is still nascent. Applying AI to internal problems has more promise. For instance, it is helping Meta solve its measurement and engagement problems.

Market revenue growth surged to 2% in Q2, but entirely-and-more driven by price rises, with underlying trends negative across volumes and ARPU.

Broadband volumes in particular turned sharply negative, largely due to a post-lockdown hangover combining with weak economic conditions.

The outlook is bleak: price rise benefits are set to wane and then reverse, and weak volumes will feed through, with economic recovery needed for a return to sustainable growth.

 

Social tariffs have provided relief for some at a time of household income squeeze and otherwise unavoidable high inflation-driven telco price increases.

Adoption has risen but remains very low, limiting their effectiveness, and more widespread adoption would expose their shortcomings, with the risk of penalizing low cost operators and significantly increasing prices for non-adopters (by up to 20%).

A better approach might be to recognize that affordability issues are narrower but deeper than current social tariffs can address, with fuller, centrally funded subsidies targeted more narrowly at those most in need.

The three planks of Netflix's strategy to stoke growth are beginning to pick up pace: pricing optimisation, charging of non-paying users and advertising are returning benefits, if at different rates. For Q2, Netflix announced growth of 5.9 million subscribers (+8% YoY) with revenues growing but at a slower rate ($1.83 billion, +2.7% YoY)

Netflix's advertising tier remains predictably peripheral. However the restructuring of its product offering and an influx of potential new subscribers who find themselves kicked out of other accounts could result in the company beginning to present to advertisers what they really want: viewers that they cannot reach easily elsewhere, if not yet at scale

The published draft Media Bill does not appear to present major issues for Netflix from a compliance standpoint, however, a clearer understanding of what "appropriate prominence" for the PSBs means is needed to calculate the impact on the streamer's access to viewers