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Tencent Announces Strategic Pivot, Focusing On Cloud and AI

Alistair Taylor
Alibaba
business services
Chinese regulators
Chinese tech major Tencent announced its first restructuring in six years and third in its 20 year history, including creating a new division to focus on business services such as cloud computing. This pivot comes off the back of the Chinese regulators freezing approvals for games licenses, a key contributor to Tencent’s revenue and an overall tightening in government regulations, which has seen a severe reduction in gaming approvals since March .
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Can ESPN+ Provide Pay-TV Networks Model To Address Declining Subscribers?

Alistair Taylor
Sports
ESPN+, Disney’s sports-centric streaming video on demand (SVOD) service, has gained more than one million paying subscribers in just over five months following its launch in April 2018 , with Kevin Mayer, chairman, Direct-To-Consumer and International, The Walt Disney Company announcing : “Reaching one million paid subscribers is an important milestone for any video subscription service, but reaching this benchmark in such a short amount of time is an incredible testament to the teams from DTCI and ESPN who have worked tirelessly to bring this product to market and continually improve it since our April launch.
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Big Brother Axed By Channel 5, But It Is Not All Bad News For Endemol

Cover image for Big Brother Axed By Channel 5, But It Is Not All Bad News For Endemol
Alistair Taylor
Big brother
Channel 4
Channel 5
Dutch production house Endemol is no longer going to be making cult reality TV show Big Brother for Viacom’s UK terrestrial channel, Channel 5. It announced that it was “disappointed not to reach an agreement with Channel 5”, following Channel 5’s admission to the BBC that “the forthcoming series of Big Brother will be the last – of either celebrity or civilian versions ­– on Channel 5”.
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How Netflix is Slowly Disrupting YouTube

Cover image for How Netflix is Slowly Disrupting YouTube
Tim Mulligan
AVOD
Netflix
Online video
One of the foundational cornerstones of monetising the digital economy is that there are two ways of paying for digital content: either with your wallet or with your attention. In the digital video streaming era, this has manifested itself in the division of business models into subscription video on demand (SVOD) streaming services, where content is accessed through a monthly paid subscription, and ad supported video on demand (AVOD), where streaming content is free to view and supported by in-video advertising.
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DAZN launches in the US – is it worth the gamble?

Alistair Taylor
On September 10 th 2018 UK-based Perform Group officially launched DAZN US, its sports streaming video on demand (SVOD) service for the US. Following its inaugural launch in August 2016 in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, which was followed shortly thereafter by its launch in Japan, Perform has been actively buying up an extensive range of international sporting rights.
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Nike Has Initiated A New Era for Politicised Brands

Georgia Meyer
Colin Kaepernick
Sports
Nike’s choice to use Colin Kaepernick as one of the faces of its Just Do It slogan anniversary campaign is the latest – but as yet unmatched in scale – step in overt brand politics. The issue which Nike has just dived into, has to be one of the most profoundly personal and local – and at the same time, national-conscience defining – issues of US politics on the table today.
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