Reports: Product Strategy

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

AI chatbots
The new conductors of entertainment

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Ben Woods

March 2025

Creators

Digital

Entertainment

AI chatbots are intersecting our entertainment lives as the tech majors transform consumer devices into digital companions. Such moves are building upon the foundations laid by smart speakers and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to elevate chatbot engagement towards the mainstream.

The case for in-game video platforms
Closing the direct-to-consumer gap

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Karol Severin

November 2024

Product Strategy

Game publishers have long used third-party video platforms like Twitch and YouTube as a springboard to promote their games. Meanwhile, Twitch and YouTube get advertising and creator-driven revenues in return. The relationship has largely been reciprocal and beneficial for both parties.

The future of creator software
Maximising AI’s engagement opportunity

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Ben Woods

November 2024

Product Strategy

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising creator software to make it easier for those with little or no skill to produce high-quality content. These innovations are proving highly disruptive to existing workflows meaning traditional creator tools will struggle unless they adapt and evolve.

The future of creator hardware
AI’s new creative lane

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Ben Woods

October 2024

Twitch

Sony

Microsoft

AI tools pose a risk to the hardware funnel by becoming the go-to toolkit for beginners and a substitute for recorded footage. With AI providing solutions at every stage of the video creator workflow, hardware must fight to justify its need. Especially because AI makes it easier for all creators to produce professional-grade content.

Social is eating entertainment
The future of memes, music, social platforms, and beyond

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Hanna Kahlert

October 2024

Product Strategy

Entertainment is now a key reason consumers engage with social platforms, opening new opportunities for social and raising new challenges for traditional entertainment. Social platforms offer not only a place to consume original content IP, but to create content around it, engage with the content discussing and unpacking it, and interact with other...

Video creator tools
Hardware user profile

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Ben Woods

September 2024

Product Strategy

The democratisation of video creation has created an unprecedented opportunity for hardware tools companies. However, converting casual creators and beginners into high spenders is difficult given the financial and educational barriers creators must overcome.

The single-player opportunity
Course correcting from a red to blue ocean

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Rhys Elliott

September 2024

YouTube

Netflix

Xbox

The AAA PC and console games market is facing growth issues, money is more expensive, and developers are facing pressure to become leaner, more profitable, and take fewer risks. Many game makers, including those that found initial success in single player, have been chasing the live-service trend.

Video creator tools
Software user profile

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Ben Woods

August 2024

Product Strategy

Creator economy

The video creator software market is evolving fast. AI tools are carving out new workflows, and the democratisation of video creation is increasing demand from social video creators and professional videographers. Editing software and plugins remain key to monetisation, but challenges are emerging from subscription-adverse creators and users brough...

Gamers' time
Where it is and how to get it

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Karol Severin

April 2024

Business Strategy

Product Strategy

With the attention economy saturated, there is next to no incremental entertainment time up for grabs. This comes precisely at a time when more games depend on growing time spent. As games are only the fifth most consumed entertainment activity among PC and console gamers, the path for games to meaningfully grow time spent is to absorb consumers’...

Beyond the obvious
Building future-focused strategy

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Mark Mulligan, Keith Jopling and Kriss Thakrar

February 2024

Product Strategy

Business strategy has long been demarcated across sustaining and disruptive innovation. In the digital realm the latter has had the upper hand, but as digital enters a slower growth phase, sustaining innovation is back in favour. Yet this is also a period of dramatic value chain shifts and is thus exactly the period when companies should instead be...

The future revenue roadmap for ‘social’ platforms
Ads, subscriptions, and creator tools

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Hanna Kahlert

December 2023

Product Strategy

As social platforms take a prominent role in the businesses of both professional creators and entertainment companies, and user creativity expands, social platforms have an opportunity to diversify their revenue streams and evolve their USPs in this changing marketplace.

State of the music creator economy
The consumer era

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Mark Mulligan

December 2023

Product Strategy

The pandemic triggered a surge in the music creator economy, which brought with it an influx of external interest and investment. 2022 saw growth moderate, but the long-term outlook is not only strong, it will also be supercharged by the consumerization of creation.

Immersive video fandom
The rise of the centralised interactive fan world

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Ben Woods

November 2023

Product Strategy

Video IP holders could extract more value from superfans by deploying monetisation strategies used by social video platforms and virtual gaming universes. The music industry has already shown how, through interactive fan worlds. These video game experiences allow IP holders to centralise fan engagement to capitalise on digital monetisation techniqu...

Generative AI
The double-edged sword for social video platforms and content creators

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Ben Woods

October 2023

Product Strategy

A significant audience now exists on social video platforms for generative-AI content. However, the speed and scale at which generative AI could produce creator content could destabilise the creator economy. If left unchecked, generative AI could tip the balance towards more inauthentic than authentic human content on social video platforms: a big ...

Burnishing the back catalogue
Retention in an inflationary era

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Ben Woods

May 2023

Spotify

Netflix

Disney

With inflation squeezing commissioning budgets, streaming-TV services are battling to demonstrate value to consumers who risk churning under pressure from the cost-of-living crisis. The big spend on new shows to grow playbook is not only unsustainable, but also out-of-step with the consumer appetite for classic content.

The great monetisation reset
New ways to monetise streaming video audiences

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Tim Mulligan and Ben Woods

April 2023

Product Strategy

This keynote took place at the beginning of the MIDiA webinar:The great monetisation reset |New ways to monetise streaming video audiences. The full presentation, panel, and Q&A session, can be found on LinkedIn and YouTube ....

Bridging the creator gap
Monetising social video’s micro-communities

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Samuel Griffin and Ben Woods

April 2023

Subscriptions

YouTube

Twitch

The pandemic-induced boom in content creation has saturated social video platforms at a time when creators are battling a downturn in digital advertising revenues. These dual pressures of less exposure and dwindling financial returns have put pressure on mid-tier creators; the community that derives all their creator income from advertising, subscr...

US millennial snapshot
A looming generational blind spot

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Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

April 2023

Spotify

YouTube

Deezer

In the US, 25-34-year-olds are the music industry’s most valuable segment. Yet their relationship with streaming is tenuous. Streaming is not meeting these consumers’ need for a more social, less algorithm-driven experience. What is more, they appear most likely to give their subscriptions up.

Music’s Instagram moment
The social music creation revolution

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Tatiana Cirisano

March 2023

Consumer behaviour

Apple

Spotify

Social media has steadily integrated music, and music creation tools have steadily become more social. These trends are converging, accelerated by shifts in consumer behaviour and artificial intelligence (AI). The result could be a new set of music creation and re-creation tools, integrated within social platforms and geared towards casual consumer...

Watch parties
Rebooting the watercooler moment

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Ben Woods

February 2023

YouTube

Amazon

Netflix

Group watching television with family and friends is being consigned to a bygone era. Algorithms are forcing entertainment consumers into silos through an endless stream of personally recommended content and the fallout is a relentless battle for audience engagement across a myriad of devices.

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