Blog: ar

On Monday, Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, a VR device positioned as a blended VR and augmented reality (AR) experience. With true AR still on the horizon, the Vison Pro uses an ultra-high-resolution display system that packs 23 million pixels across two displays to digitally replicate the user’s field of vision.

As entertainment companies start planning their next big steps for the coming year, the success and failure of their strategic decisions will hinge on one big, and perhaps surprising, existential question : is this it for the tech industry? Planning for 2023 seems to mean planning for disruption, and this is no easy thing to do – especially given the changes already wrought by the last three years of predominately virtual working.

Amid a perfect storm of government scrutiny, potential anti-trust legislation, a whistle-blower, and social media disruption at the hands of burgeoning creator tools (like TikTok), Facebook – sorry, Meta – has announced its grand plan to build out the new future of the digital frontier: the metaverse.

Just when sports fans thought it was safe to go back into the water, COVID reared its ugly head once more. UK fan pilot sporting events were all set to start allowing fans back into arenas and attend live events, but government restrictions have now been re-imposed to limit the spread of coronavirus, crippling any chances of normality resuming in the near-term.

Football (via the Bundesliga) finally returned to screens last weekend, not only serving starved sports fans with content during lockdown, but more importantly demonstrated what we can expect live football to look like in the coming months.

MIDiA has just published its annual predictions report . Here are a few highlights. 2018 was another year of change, disruption and transformation across media and technology. Although hyped technologies – VR, blockchain, AI music – failed to meet inflated expectations, concepts such as privacy, voice, emerging markets and peak in the attention economy shaped the evolution of digital content businesses, in a year that was one to remember for subscriptions across all content types.

A succession of conversations with record labels over the last couple of months has made me start to ponder whether we are approaching a tipping point in streaming era A&R. At the heart of the conversations is whether the growing role of playlists and the increased use of streaming analytics is making label A&R strategy proactive or reactive? Is what people are listening to shaped by the labels or the streaming service? To subvert Paul Weller’s 1980s Jam lyrics: Does the public get what the public wants or does the public want what the public gets? An old dynamic reinvented Radio used to be the main way in which audiences were essentially told what to listen to.

When it comes to the music industry’s transition towards streaming, how the model has worked in the past requires a reconsideration of perspective. This is because throughout the business’s entire history, catalogue and copyright accounted for the majority of revenue, as breaking new artists was, and remains, an expensive endeavour very much in the VC model of investment, with a few large payoffs accounting for the overall cost.

Whilst those uneasy by the company's IPO may feel vindicated by the stock’s falling price, it may not be wise to completely write-off Snap Inc. just yet. Snap Inc. is ‘a camera company’. If we momentarily ignore the questions over monetisation, Snapchat has a hold on youthful demographics that other services would die for, hence the eagerness of Facebook to mimic features of Snapchat such as lenses and Messenger Day, a clone of Snapchat’s Stories.