Event Postponed
Just to confirm that tonight's MIDiA Event is not taking place. The event has been postponed and we will announce the new date shortly.
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Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.
Is Rugby in a state of crisis?
The value of Rugby has suffered another major blow in what has already been a tumultuous year financially for the sport. The asking price for the Six Nations title sponsorship has plunged 64% to just £6 million ($7.
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The Fan Bingbing Story and What it Means for China’s 2018 Video Transformation
China has come a long way in short time in video. Going hand in hand with the dramatic economic expansion the Country has experienced, China’s domestic box office alone increased 19-fold between 2007 and 2017 to an estimated $8.
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Facebook Launches Its Smart Speaker: A Few Strategic Considerations For Portal
Earlier this year, MIDiA predicted that Facebook would join the smart speaker market. A TV dongle or smart speaker: It makes strategic sense for Facebook to develop a TV dongle like Amazon’s Fire Stick or smart speaker like Apple’s HomePod, to give it a hardware foothold in the home—something that Oculus clearly is not going to be anytime soon, if ever.
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Advertising Week New York: The Dynamic, the Dead and the Dangerous
Notoriously overwhelming, this week’s AWNY ramped activities up even further, expanding the number of stages from 8 to 12. A disorientating amount of content to navigate and a somewhat amusing metaphor for today’s digital consumer.
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Looking for the Music in Tencent Music
The Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) F1 filing makes for highly interesting reading, but don’t expect copious amounts of data to give you an inside track in the way that Spotify’s F1 filing did. Instead TME’s F1 bears much closer resemblance to iQyi’s F1, namely a basic level of KPIs, lots of market narrative and even more space assigned to explaining all of the risks associated with investing in a Chinese company.
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Making Free Pay: Fine-tuning Freemium
Streaming is transforming music and TV business models, driving growth in both audiences and revenue. A balance between free and paid tiers and services has been key to this success, but, growth is not always balanced, and as we approach maturity in many western markets, more may be needed of free, ad supported options.
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Google Reveals Interactive YouTube Ad Tools as it Prepares to Compete with Amazon
Ads on YouTube are about to get a lot more interactive. With competition from Amazon heating up, Google is doubling down on the competitive advantage of its video assets, namely YouTube’s unrivalled position as a how-to video domain, compared to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video’s more premium offerings.
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Tencent Announces Strategic Pivot, Focusing On Cloud and AI
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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The State of California Goes Head to Head with The US Department of Justice on Net Neutrality
The Golden State is renowned for doing things differently from the rest of the US and, yesterday, its liberal credentials were reiterated by California Governor Jerry Brown signing net neutrality legislation into state law.
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Can ESPN+ Provide Pay-TV Networks Model To Address Declining Subscribers?
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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Can Xbox All Access Help Microsoft Tip The Games Console Market Share In Its Favour?
As you probably know by now, Microsoft launched Xbox All Access in the US. It is a bundle deal offering an Xbox console and a two year access to Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Live – all this in return for 24 monthly payments of $21.
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Comcast Has won The First Round Of The New World Media War
On Saturday Comcast won the auction battle between itself and rival 21 st Century Fox For the 61% of the company which Fox does not own. In a dramatic end to the three stage bidding process, Comcast offered £4 billion ($6 billion) more than Fox’s bid which was backed by Disney, which will inherit the 39% of Sky still owned by Fox when it completes its $71.
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Sirius XM Acquires Pandora: Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts?
In the latest example of media acquisitions, though one less likely to flood the headlines as Comcast’s purchase of Sky, Sirius XM has announced it will be purchasing streaming service Pandora for $3.
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Will Direct Distribution Result in the YouTubification of Spotify?
Spotify until now has been chiefly about, for want of a better word, the ‘professional musician’. True, many artists on the platform may not be making a living exclusively through their art, but many are still going through some form of label services and distribution deal.
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Spotify’s Tencent Risk
NOTE: a previous version of this post referred to a non-compete clause with Spotify detailed in this SEC filing. I have been advised that the scope of this clause is narrower than I had originally interpreted.
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Has the BBC Cured Streaming Latency?
Two weeks ago , the NFL warned subscription video on demand (SVOD) services to up their content delivery game if they are to be taken seriously when bidding for premium rights. It must therefore come as good news for streaming services as it appears the BBC may have potentially broken through the latency problem facing streamers of live sporting events.
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Why Sky has Placed A Strategic Bet On Disruptor Netflix
Today’s announcement that Netflix is going to be part of premium Sky offerings as from November, is a bigger deal for the UK pay-TV operator than it is for the US SVOD market leader. Netflix will form part of a new Sky subscription pack available on Sky Q called Ultimate On Demand .
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Big Brother Axed By Channel 5, But It Is Not All Bad News For Endemol
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
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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