TikTok’s future hangs in the balance, with its January deadline to find a new owner fast approaching beneath the oversight of a new, and unpredictable, US administration. President Trump originally tried to ban the app himself in 2020 by executive order, which failed.

Seemingly every manufacturer in the games space is working on a portable machine. Now, Bloomberg sources claim that Sony has started early work on a portable that plays PS5 games. Microsoft’s head of gaming, Phil Spencer, has already confirmed that Xbox is working on its own portable (also per Bloomberg ).

Japanese media conglomerate Kadokawa recently confirmed that Sony sent it a letter of intent to acquire Kadokawa (increasing its current 2% stake). Kadokawa owns FromSoftware, the developer of Elden Ring , a 25-million-selling game that became a huge cultural moment in 2022.

Last week, Spotify announced a suite of new monetisation features for video creators. Yes, you read that right — Spotify has expanded not just beyond music, but also beyond audio itself. Although the video offerings are initially geared towards video podcasters, the company has rebranded its Spotify for Podcasters hub to Spotify for Creators , opening the door for the possibility of catering to video creators more generally (à la YouTube).

In October, MIDiA positioned Spotify’s video push as both a strategic move against YouTube and also as an evolution in the platform from music-first to audio-first to format agnostic. As we noted, the company’s mission statement is “ to unlock the potential of human creativity — by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it ”.

The AI revolution sweeping the entertainment industry will rage on in 2025. In recent weeks, TikTok owner ByteDance has provided a deeper look into how AI will impact social platforms . Through a series of quick-fire announcements, it revealed TikTok’s AI tools for advertisers as well as separate creator features for building AI-powered chat bots.

As Clayton Christensen identified in The Innovator’s Dilemma, there are two types of innovation: sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation. Sustaining innovation is what companies do to enhance existing business models, while disruptive innovation is typically driven by new entrants – insurgents looking to make markets by turning established ones upside down.

Twitter clones have proliferated since Elon Musk first bought and renamed the platform to X in 2022. Despite a lot of buzz around platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky, none have seemed to capture a significant audience, with X’s weekly active usage remaining consistent.

Couch co-op gaming, when two or more players in the same room play together co-operatively, already has some proven success stories: It Takes Two , a co-op-only platformer from EA studio Hazelight, has sold over 20 million copies.

Unpacking social media strategy is now part and parcel of any election postmortem. From Elon Musk’s ownership of X to Donald Trump’s use of creators to target Gen Z men, understanding social’s role in the US election is to understand how influence is wielded in the digital age.

For much of 2024, music industry discourse centred around Spotify’s content mix. The growing long-tail of artists and songs on the platform is what fueled Universal Music Group’s two-tiered royalty system, and rights holders continue to raise concerns about sharing space with audiobooks and podcasts.

As one of the key players in podcast industry trends and podcast monetisation, what happens at Acast matters. The company’s financials provide insight into the global podcasting market, signalling to the broader industry the strength of podcast advertising.

The recent US election has capped off one of the biggest global election years in recent history, and the world around us is changing rapidly. Digital life, and specifically social media platforms, play a huge role in both how we have got to where we are and where we are going next.

Nintendo is at the forefront of the cross-entertainment trend. Alongside console games and hardware, Nintendo’s strategy spans theme parks, Hollywood (including the billion-dollar-grossing Super Mario movie), mobile, toys, merch, and even alarm clocks.

Companies building creator hardware are used to disruption. The last seismic shift came in the shape of the smartphone. Mass market point-and-shoot cameras were met with an existential crisis when lenses and microphones capable of capturing high-quality video footage began making their way into mobile devices.

We are almost two years into the reality of large-language-model (LLM) artificial intelligence. Now, the future of AI is heralding the return of nuclear power: both Google and Microsoft have announced that they are investing in the revival of power plants to satiate the depthless energy needs of their models.

US presidential campaign ads are ubiquitous on television. Leading up to the election, every commercial break is an alternating flurry of messaging from each side. This year, however, we saw the first ‘podcast election’, with podcasts playing a key role in presidential campaigning as well.

Microsoft’s Q3 2024 results (fiscal Q1 2025) continue to reflect Xbox’s shifting strategy: Xbox’s gaming revenue grew 43% year-on-year , but essentially all of this growth came from the Activision Blizzard acquisition (43 points of net impact) Xbox content and service revenue grew 61% , with 53 revenue points of net impact from the acquisition Xbox’s hardware sales fell 29%, continuing a trend from previous quarters Black Ops 6 has performed well so far , setting records for day one players, new Game Pass subscribers on a launch day, and increased unit sales off-platform Xbox’s Activision Blizzard acquisition is doing its job Let’s address the elephant in the room: In terms of overall gaming revenue for the quarter, Microsoft’s growth would have been flat if not for the Activision Blizzard acquisition.