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.

Why BritBox Is the Switzerland of the D2C Era

Tim Mulligan
BritBox
d2c
DTC
Last Thursday marked the official UK launch of BritBox –the British broadcasting industry’s answer to the D2C services currently redefining how viewers consume TV shows. Britbox launched in 2017 and built up a subscriber base of 650,000 in the US and Canada on the back of being able to position itself as a niche streaming provider of British content.
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Disney FY 2019 Results – The Final Sanity Check Before Everything Changes

Tim Mulligan
d2c
Disney
HBO Max
We are now less than a week away from possibly the most important day in Disney’s 21stcentury history, as November 12this when its direct to consumer (D2C) service Disney+ goes live. While we will not have meaningful numbers come through until the end of the first calendar quarter of 2020, the weight of expectation on the iconic media powerhouse is unprecedented and today’s announcement is the last time before their bullish projections for domestic and international growth for the service start to mesh with real hard engagement metrics.
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Seven Developments in Recorded Music in the 2010s (and the Songs that Defined them)

Zach Fuller
cardi b
cultural insight
Drake
Decade retrospectives are almost doomed to fail. Assess the 60s in 1969 and you would have likely overweighed the influence of Grand Funk Railroad compared to The Velvet Underground. When it comes to the 70s, proto Hip-Hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash or the Post-Punk of Joy Division would have been a mere footnote in favour of David Naughton or Melissa Manchester.
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Creators Versus Distributors: What Happens When Brands Can No Longer Rely on Their Content?

Hanna Kahlert
Colin Kaepernick
digital behaviour
Marketing
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, technology is completely altering the relationship between ‘creators’ and distributors – and it is doing so in a way which is empowering the independent agency of creators, while leaving those companies that focus upon the distribution of their work increasingly scrambling to justify the ROI between content provision and monetisation.
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How the D2C Revolution Might Accelerate an Impending Recession

Cover image for How the D2C Revolution Might Accelerate an Impending Recession
Tim Mulligan
d2c
Peak Attention
peak attention economy
Recessions are notoriously difficult to accurately predict, and the next global recession is still hovering on the edge of reality. The macro-economic view is increasingly gloomy, with the ongoing Brexit process in Europe being exacerbated by increasingly fraught trade disputes between the US and China – the world’s largest and second-largest consumer economies.
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What Banijay’s Interest in Endemol Shine Tells Us About TV Show Fandom

Cover image for What Banijay’s Interest in Endemol Shine Tells Us About TV Show Fandom
Tim Mulligan
Banijay
Big brother
Black Mirror
With Vivendi-backed Banijay on the verge of acquiring Endemol Shine this week, we are entering a new era of monetising fandom in the on-demand streaming era. Banijay is reportedly offering $2.2 billion to acquire the Disney/Apollo-owned production company famous for producing hits for two very different eras – the linear TV hit reality show Big Brother and the dystopian Sci-Fi streaming anthology hit Black Mirror.
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