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.

Quick Take: Will Stream Djing be the Renaissance of Soundcloud?

Zach Fuller
After a difficult two yearsthat saw acquisitions fall through and a lack of meaningful uptake of its subscription service, SoundCloud have needed some positive news. Reveredwithin the creator community though still struggling to make a profit, SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainorannounced today at Amsterdam Dance Eventthat DJs will soon be able to mix and perform by streaming material from SoundCloud’s catalogue within DJ software programs.
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Facebook Launches Its Smart Speaker: A Few Strategic Considerations For Portal

Cover image for Facebook Launches Its Smart Speaker: A Few Strategic Considerations For Portal
Zach Fuller
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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Looking for the Music in Tencent Music

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Mark Mulligan
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

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Mark Mulligan
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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Tencent Announces Strategic Pivot, Focusing On Cloud and AI

Alistair Taylor
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
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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