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.

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
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

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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

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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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