Besides the anticipated device shrinking , Apple made another important announcement at its Special Event yesterday. After recapping the tremendous success ResearchKit has had with improving medical research, Apple launched CareKit, a new software framework designed to help developers enable people to actively manage their own medical conditions.

A number of signals were sent by Apple during the Apple Special Event in Cupertino today. Tim Cook started off by sharing that there are now 1 billion Apple devices in use around the world. Furthermore, Apple is now 93% energy renewable, with 100% in the US, China and other 21 countries.

The album has been under assault ever since Napster first gave consumers the ability cherry pick their favourite tracks and leave the filler behind. Apple formalised the process with the iTunes Store and in recent years streaming has hammered the nail in the coffin by supercharging the consumption shift towards playlists.

Today Sky announced that it is making a selection of sports content available to basic package subscribers. A new channel called Sky Sports Mix launching this summer will bring a range of sports content to all its TV customers in the UK and Ireland.

Today Sky announced that it has created an in-house unit dedicated to Virtual Reality (VR) content production called Sky VR Studio. This underlines the importance with which Europe’s largest pay-TV company assigns to the new immersive form of story telling.

On March 14th, Comic-Con and Lionsgate jointly announced the imminent launch of Comic-Con HQ a new SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) service. The new platform will allow Beta access on the 7th of May in advance of its official launch in in June.

Last Friday, Baidu, the Chinese tech group mainly known for its leading search engine in the Chinese market, announced that it was effectively spinning off Qiyi (recently rebranded to the domestic market as iQiyi).

2016 is proving to be tricky year for streaming rights. No sooner did it start to look like artists and labels were beginning to feel comfortable with streaming then along come a veritable flood of songwriter class action suits in the US, against TIDAL , Rhapsody and Spotify , twice .

While the music industry slowly got its head around the brave new world of digital in the 2000’s piracy used to be the dominant focus of record labels and their trade associations. Now, with so much momentum and scale among legitimate services that focus has understandably lessened.

Guardian Circle is a new app, which allows you to build groups of ‘guardians’ consisting of personal contacts that you wish to rely on. You cansendalerts to these groups immediately bringing your guardians into an ‘alert room’, where they see your location and can chat with you to figure out how to best help you.

Last Thursday Variety reported that Facebook is considering bidding for the NFL streaming rights for Thursday night games. The National Football league is auctioning off the digital rights to stream 18 regular season games on OTT services (Non-Traditional-internet based video streaming services.

Slowly but surely the traditional media industries are waking up to the importance of YouTubers but those taking note most quickly are the subscription video companies, Netflix in particular. As recently illustrated by its commissioning of ‘Haters Back Off’ from YouTuber Colleen Balling-Evans’ alter-ego Miranda Sings – who incidentally has 6 million subscribers on YouTube, nearly 10% of Netflix’s entire subscriber base.

One of the key changes stemming from the evolution of desk/laptop content consumption to smartphones is that the native operational mode of the latter is vertical. The only reason to turn it sideways is when there’s no way of enjoying the full experience vertically.

There are two gaping holes in the digital music landscape: 1) a wide range of products for mass market consumers, 2) telco music bundles for pre-pay mobile customers. MusicQubed has just taken a stab at addressing both with a MTV Trax pre-pay SIM bundle with UK mobile carrier EE.

Independent label services company Essential Music & Marketing is no longer independent, having just been acquired by Sony Musi c and merged with Sony’s label services division Red to create a new entity: Red Essential.

The BBC has launched a music app called, well, BBC Music . Available only in the UK, this native music app is one step on a well considered path for the BBC as it tries to carve out a role for itself in streaming era.

2015 was a big year for streaming music but it was a bigger deal for streaming video, generating $16 billion in revenue compared to $4.5 billion for streaming music. (Both figures are retail values). The contrast between the two streaming markets is pronounced: Streaming Video: Exclusives are a standard part of video services Streaming Music: Virtually all of the same 30 million songs are available everywhere Streaming Video: Rights are fragmented across a host of TV networks and studios Streaming Music: 3 labels account for the majority of rights Streaming Video: Subscribers are just as likely to be male or female and have relatively even age distribution Streaming Music: Subscribers are predominately male and under 45 Streaming Video: Services compete on price, content proposition and functionality Streaming Music: Services largely operate within the same price point and content Streaming Video: Video services are profitable (Netflix has a 32.

Last Wednesday at the MMIX stream of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Scott Mirer, VP of the device partner ecosystem at Netflix gave a keynote speech where he shared newly acquired insights into global SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) consumption.