Reports: tech majors

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 current division between the new video D2C entrants of 2019/2020 has revealed a strategic split between those that are leveraging established distribution advantages versus those focused on monetising existing content assets. The current market distortions wrought by the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic have placed power firmly in the hands of services able to leverage zeitgeisty originals combined with libraries of proven content and brand assets.

The tech majors are power players in the global digital content marketplace through a combination of their own content services, ad monetisation and control of audiences via devices, search and social. While advertising and services revenues are still a minority of total tech major revenues, the share is substantial, and revenues are growing fast.

Streaming is rewriting the games market rulebook. The games subscription landscape is undergoing foundational changes driven by a growing list of new market entrants including tech majors, telcos, leading games developers and publishers. The rise of games streaming opens doors to device- and platform-agnostic solutions all across the attention economy, as companies look to capture the engagement of valuable gamer segments for their respective ecosystems and business objectives.

The clock is ticking down to 2021 when the major domestic sports rights in the US and the UK will start coming up for renewal. Thus far, pureplay sports streaming video on demand (SVOD) services such as DAZN and Eleven Sports have experienced mixed fortunes.

Streaming is about to take the gaming world by storm. With new entrants including Google, Amazon, and Verizon, and others to come in the future, the traditionally siloed gaming model is becoming part of a wider cross-format, platform-agnostic play in the attention economy.

In this report MIDiA Research analysts present their predictions for what will be the big trends in digital media and tech, across music, video, media, brands, marketing, games and sports in 2019. Companies and brands mentioned in this report: ABC, Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Amazon Prime Video, Apple, Apple Music, AT&T, BBC, BT, BT Sports, BT TV, Bundesliga, Cambridge Analytica, DAZN, Disney, Eleven Sports, Endemol, ESPN, ESPN+, EU, FA Cup, Facebook, Fox, Google, Grey’s Anatomy, HBO, Hitco, IGTV, Instagram, Instagram TV, Jet.

Q2 2018 delivered contrasting milestones for the tech majors with Apple becoming the first company to have a trillion-dollar market capitalisation while Facebook simultaneously saw the single biggest one-day loss in market capitalisation in the history of US stock exchanges.

In Q1 2018 advertising revenue and services revenue drove strong growth for the tech majors – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, with Alphabet and Apple retaining their respective leads in each of those revenue segments but losing market share. Subscriptions were also a big part of the Q1 narrative; Amazon and Apple highlighted significant subscription growth underpinning their growing service businesses.

This report is a write up of key themes from one of MIDiA’s 2018 keynotes looking at the key trends, innovations and disruptions that will shape media and technology over the coming years. The full presentation is published online alongside this report.

As we correctly predicted, 2016 was the year video ate the world. 2017 is going to be shaped by the battle for consumer attention through formatting and distribution wars. VR is likely to cede further ground to AR, bots will become established, while messaging apps add to their dominant position (even though user growth will slow).

The world of mobile is undergoing a seismic shift. It used to be that the smartphone platform world was largely understood in terms of a couple of big operating systems (iOS and Android) and their respective app stores. But now a succession of apps have emerged as platforms that exist both within and across OS boundaries.