UK Gamer Profile
Digital Entertainment Natives

Karol Severin

June 2018

Apple

Spotify

YouTube

Mobile and PC gamer penetration declined slightly in the UK between Q4 2016 and Q4 2017. Meanwhile, console ownership did not grow either, attesting that the market is constrained by the impending peak in the attention economy. It is becoming harder to compete for attention and engagement, precisely at the wrong time.

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Voice Control Devices
Early Audience Behaviours and Adoption

Zach Fuller

March 2018

Consumer behaviour

Apple

Spotify

Connected voice-control devices epitomised by the Amazon Echo have transformed from being mere curiosities of consumer electronic R&D divisions, into becoming positioned as the next hardware paradigm. With impressive growth since its November 2014 release via Amazon Prime’s US customer base, the Echo and subsequent competing voice control dev...

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The Sports Rights Bubble
Reaching The Tipping Point

Tim Mulligan

January 2018

UK

Australia

Amazon

The broadcasting of live sport has been a key part of TV’s appeal and underpins the pay-TV ecosystem. However, a combination of entrenched cord-cutting and an ageing audience means that revenues are now moving out of synch with inflating domestic sports rights costs.

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Apple Q4 (Calendar Q3) 2017
Quarterly Revenue Growth Underpins 2017 Revenue Revival

November 2017

Apple

Apple

ipad

Apple continued its sales momentum this quarter with the launch of hardware products such as iPhone 8 and 8 Plus models in September. Both smartphones have incorporated new features, such as augmented reality (AR) technology and wireless charging, to meet the demands of its pre-existing consumer base as well as to attract new users.

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Quick Take: Will PlayStation’s growing VR games catalogue move the needle for its VR hardware?

Karol Severin

1 Nov 2017

Games

PlayStation

Playstation VR

We have written on the potential of VR in the past , specifically about our concern that gaming VR headsets will not take off en masse, until there is content mix compelling enough to justify device price points.

min read

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Media Company Strategy
How Legacy Format Audiences Can Fund Digital Transition

Zach Fuller

September 2017

publishing

physical books

mass media

Media’s well documented struggles of balancing the decline of ad revenue with building digital subscriber bases has resulted in surprising strategic actions by some of its largest entities. As the tech majors take more digital ad revenue form across the digital sphere, publishing, music and online video companies are quietly super-serving legacy ...

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Amazon Music
The Dark Horse Comes Out Of The Shadows

Mark Mulligan

September 2017

Streaming

Streaming Music

Music Subscriptions

Back in the days when online music meant online CD sales, Amazon was the king. Then, along came Apple with iTunes music store and Amazon saw the throne snatched from its hands. No sooner had Apple started to enjoy its reign that Spotify came along to usurp the throne.

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Voice Control
Market Strategy for the Next Major Hardware Paradigm

Zach Fuller

May 2017

Apple

Marketing

Amazon

Acting as a Trojan horse in consumer electronics, voice control slipped under the radar compared to more bombastic new technologies such as Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, to quietly become a potential paradigm shift in the computer interface.

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Next Generation Networks
What A Post-Pay-TV Video Network Looks Like

Tim Mulligan

March 2017

Apple

YouTube

Amazon

In the cord-cutting era TV networks are having to think about what life beyond the traditional pay-TV ecosystem might look like. With SVOD services snapping up audiences in their millions, operators are busy focusing on higher ARPU users and demanding more rights from networks but with tightening budgets.

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Paid Versus Free
Monetisation In The Post-Sales World

Zach Fuller

February 2017

Apple

Apple

Spotify

As the app economy matures into an amorphous content landscape, a picture emerges of how free and pure subscription models impact the bottom-line of the creative industries across music, online video, publishing and gaming. In one corner, freemium has been accused of devaluing content as a product, yet it is also credited with driving higher revenu...

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Live Entertainment
Measuring Music's Place

Mark Mulligan

February 2017

Streaming Music

Spotify

live music

The live music industry has always had a slightly incongruous relationship with its recorded music industry cousin. Often having to tolerate the record labels’ business being called ‘the music industry’ and equally often, finding itself at the focus of consumer discontent over ticketing practices.

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Streaming Music Pricing
Inelastic Stretching

Mark Mulligan

February 2017

Streaming

Streaming Music

streaming subscriptions

Pricing has long been an issue for streaming music subscriptions, with the $9.99 price point having the double challenge of reducing the spending of the most valuable music buyers and being higher than the average spend of most music buyers. Streaming services have worked around the issue with a combination of telco music bundles and aggressive pri...

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Overcoming VR Adoption Hurdles

Zach Fuller

January 2017

Streaming

Radio

Paid Content

When it comes to disruptive technology, emerging formats such as Virtual Reality have been here before. The part about innovation that can so often omitted by uplifting TED lectures is that whilst these technologies present incredible opportunities, amongst the hype and excitement are often serious debates on how differently various contributors wi...

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Facebook The Media Company
If It Looks Like A Duck

Mark Mulligan

December 2016

Paid Content

Facebook

Content strategy

Facebook beat financial analyst estimates with its Q3 2016 earnings but announced that ad revenues would likely slow in 2017, due to the digital ad market feeling the pinch of advertiser budgets, which are lagging behind the shift in user behaviour. Facebook’s stock fell by 7% but Plan B is already in motion: to become a media company.

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Facebook Messenger User Profile
Streaming Savvy Mainstream Messaging App Users

Karol Severin

December 2016

Facebook messenger

Mobile messaging

Messaging apps

Facebook Messenger has caught up with WhatsApp, boasting more than 1 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Along with WhatsApp and Instagram, Messenger is part of Facebook’s bet on the future of audiences as they migrate away from social networks. Facebook’s messaging apps are the company’s gateway to owning as much as possible of consumers’...

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Next Generation Apps
The Rise Of Mobile Life Ecosystems

Karol Severin

November 2016

app economy

next generation apps

mobile life ecosystems

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.

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Virtual Reality
The Content Conundrum

Tim Mulligan

August 2016

scripted drama

VR

virtual reality

At the start of 2016 the tech hype machine was going into overdrive over the potential for Virtual Reality to finally break through to the mainstream. January’s CES in Las Vegas featured the launch of Fox Studio’s The Martian Experience, their second VR project in conjunction with a major big screen production.

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The Steady Demise Of The CD Buyer
How The Music Industry Is Sleepwalking Into A Revenue Collapse

Mark Mulligan

February 2016

cd revenue

cd buyers

Music buyers

The CD was the catalyst for the record labels’ apogee but now resembles a product strategy time bomb ticking away. With all the momentum of streaming it is tempting to discount CD buyers as an inconvenient legacy of the physical era, a format anomaly that will soon pass.

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Next Steps For Music Video
How Music Videos Miss Much Of The YouTube Opportunity

Tim Mulligan

January 2016

YouTube

Twitter

music video

The music video has undergone a major transformation since its original conceptualisation in the 1970s and commercialisation in the 1980s. Originally a tool to drive sales, MTV transformed it into a product in its own right and then YouTube did the same thing for the digital era.

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The TV App Revolution
Authenticated Channel Apps And TVE Strategy

Tim Mulligan

December 2015

apps

cord nevers

SVOD

Pay-TV is under assault from a pincer movement, on the one hand losing subscribers to cord cutting and on the other growth slowing due to cord-nevers (Digital Natives with no interest in subscribing to traditional pay-TV). Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and others welcome these consumers with open arms.

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