Last Friday’s (August 17th) revelation, that global subscription video on demand (SVOD) market leader Netflix was running trailers on the service for its original content shows, has created a Voldemort (that which cannot be said) moment for the company.

It is the fastest growing segment of the business and yet until recently no one seems to have addressed the extent to which Amazon’s advertising is becoming an increasing force in ad land. Now that’s its online gaming streaming platform Twitch is targeting over $1 billion in annually in advertising, will the next two years see the e-commerce and cloud giant meaningfully break the digital ad duopoly held by Alphabet and Facebook? Firstly, some figures: Amazon’s advertising business could deliver as much as $8/9 billion USD for 2018.

On the August 6th The Information published an article debunking the hype around the voice-activated shopping sector. Based on information gleaned from people present at an internal Amazon briefing, the article revealed that the numbers of people who use voice activated devices to shop are actually very small.

When Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of Buzzfeed, made the now famous statement that, “Content is King but distribution is the Queen, and she wears the trousers” back in 2015, he perhaps did not realise quite how instructive that observation would come to be for the media landscape.

Despite the shock to Facebook’s growth narrative in the first half of 2018, the social media giant is not standing still in rolling out its global content strategy. First came the Cambridge Analytica data leaking scandal in April and then the unprecedented 20% plunge ($120 billion – equivalent to the loss of nearly four Spotifys) in its market cap in July, instigated by a decline in daily active users (DAUs) in Q2 2018.

On 6th August, news broke that Facebook had approached the US’s largest banks with a request for them to share their customers’ private data. Upon news of this breaking in the Wall Street Journal, a Facebook spokesperson was swift to announce that this data would not be used for advertising purposes.

Monday’s news that Netflix’s long-serving CFO David Wells was stepping down from his position, has once again made the company’s financial operations the centre of attention. Wells's tenure oversaw an unprecedented level of debt issuance by the company with $8.

The tech world has no shortage of acronyms for the big tech companies (GAFA, GAAF, Fang, the four horsemen…). At MIDiA we like to keep things simple, just like the major record labels and major TV studios we call the big four tech companies the Tech Majors.

MIDiA has just published a new report that deep dives into how streaming is, or in some cases is not, lifting off in emerging markets. The regions we focused on were Russia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, China and India.

It does not seem long ago that slowed growth was enough to imbue discussions around then social media enfant terrible Snapchat with rumours of decline. However, this week’s Q2 announcement was a defining one for the LA-based social media company.

Yesterday a besieged Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of Walt Disney Co. had to defend his company’s Q3 (calendar Q2) results against the inflated demands of Wall Street. Disney has come out with a bold strategy to compete directly with subscription video on demand (SVOD) services, with the announcement of its intent to launch a direct-to-consumer Disney originals content proposition in 2019, alongside the launch of streaming sports service ESPN+ in April 2018 .

Four years after Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion, the ubiquitous messaging app is ramping up its revenue potential with the launch last week of a suite of business tools and new advertising inventory on the app.

Sports entertainment disruptor Eleven Sports has been making headway over the previous 12 months with a series of notable acquisitions of premium sports rights in non-premium markets. Eleven’s business model involves building a next-generation direct-to-consumer proposition through a contract-free on-demand sports streaming service.

The sports landscape fundamentally changed when tech major Amazon won the exclusive rights to package F in the landmark English Premier League (EPL) rights deal in June. The acquisition of key rights previously held by traditional TV networks represents the culmination of a succession of market shifts: Declining traditional broadcast sports viewingAn ageing TV sports audienceTransition of sports consumption to online and mobile,The emergence of SVOD sports services In light of this downturn and a fall in the consumption of sports content on traditional linear TV, moves are being made into the subscription video on demand (SVOD) space, with Disney’s new direct-to-consumer flagship sports SVOD service ESPN+ leading the charge.

This really sets the cat amongst the pigeons. Following months of rumours that suggested French media giant Vivendi would spin off UMG into a separate entity via an IPO, the Bollore owned company have instead announced they will be selling off 50% of the company within the next 18 months.

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.

The tipping point in the 2015 film The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 financial crisis, is when it dawns on Steve Carrell’s character upon traveling down from New York City to Florida, that a plethora of unstable loans had been granted to people with very little prospects of paying them back.

Yesterday (July 25 th ) Facebook announced its Q2 earnings and the results were not what the big financial speculators were looking for. Revenue for the quarter was $13.32 billion versus the $13.36 billion consensus estimate.