Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) November 25th 2019

Disney tidies its streaming stats: Disney is tidying up its streaming subscriber numbers in preparation for reporting the performance so far of Disney+. In the shake-up, ESPN falls from 3.4 million to three million while Hulu goes from a 28.5 million to 29 million. All figures Q3 2019. Headline: Disney is already a streaming powerhouse and is about to become even bigger.

Spotify awards: Spotify is moving into the music awards space. The only surprise is that Spotify didn’t do this sooner; this is the equivalent of MTV moving into the awards space in the 2010s. Spotify will be hoping, probably with good reason, that it will be able to make its awards a bigger deal than YouTube has its YouTube Music Awards.

Tecent’s global gaming empire: Tencent has invested in 40% of Fortnite owner Epic Games and 11.5% in competitor PUBG. By using access to the Chinese market as leverage for getting equity stakes in western games publishers, Tencent is building a global games business. It may even be en route to becoming a global tech major. It has a long way to go, through.

YouTube creators can take a break, perhaps: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki claims her company’s analytics can take a break from making content and come back with bigger metrics. The data is likely skewed by a) under-performing channels taking a break, and b) the novelty factor of a returning creator. The underlying truth, however, is that YouTube’s monetisation system skews strongly towards high-volume output. The system needs changing if creators are to genuinely be able to take breaks.

Throw ladders down: Meghan Rapinoe’s acceptance speech for her Woman of the Year award presents a new vision for how those with influence should use their platform for others’ voices, by ‘throwing down ladders’ for others to climb up. She tackles inequality in many forms in her speech and sounds more like an accomplished activist politician than a sports personality. If only all sports people (and politicians) could make contributions like this. Go watch the video.

Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know)

Apple ups its artist analytics but do artists care? Kobalt and Spotify both helped reshape the music industry’s understanding of what role data should play and how it should be presented. Apple announced its Apple Music for Artists (AMFA) is coming out of betawith a whole host of cool dashboards and analytics that dive down to city level. Powerful stuff indeed. The problem, though, is not data scarcity but data abundance. Overwhelmed by dashboards and tools, artists and their managers are becoming victims of data paralysis.

Streaming video endgame:Paradigm-shifting announcements don’t come along often and when they do it is not always obvious that they are so important. This is one of them: Disney announced it will bundle its forthcoming Disney+ with Hulu and ESPN+ all for just $12.99.For a tiny fraction of a cable subscription, Disney is giving the average family everything it needs from a TV package. The bundle simultaneously competes with Netflix and the traditional pay-TV companies Disney relies upon for carriage fees. This is go-big-or-go-home for Disney and is perhaps the biggest, boldest move yet in the streaming wars.

 

Star Wars – too much too soon: When Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.1 billion in 2012 it was a statement of intent, particularly following the 2009 acquisition of Marvel. Marvel prospered with the almost TV-episode frequency of releases; the Star Wars franchise less so. With toy sales down, Galaxy’s Edge underattended, and disgruntled fansCEO Bob Iger cited ‘Star Wars fatigue’ and committed to slowing the release schedule. The temptation to saturate markets to compete in the attention economy can be hard to resist.

Pluto drives Viacom growth: Viacom’s ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV hit 18 million active users at the end of July, up from 12 million at the start of the year– with its connected TV user segment growing 400% year on year. Growth is so fast that 50% of ad inventory remains unsold. Nonetheless, coupled with Viacom’s Advanced Marketing Solutions (AMS) division US ad revenues returned to growth (6%) in the quarter while total Viacom revenues were up 6% also, to $3.35 billion. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Sports bubble? What sports bubble? With pay-TV companies losing subscribers and overspending on drama to hold off Netflix, budgets for sports rights are going to feel the pressure. But in the English Premier League (EPL) the mantra is make hay while the sun shines. Total transfer spending before the pre-season deadline reached £1.41billion which was fractionally below the £1.43billion record set in 2017. More than half the clubs broke their individual player transfer records. The market will likely get even more heated when streaming players start increasing their spend, but if they get a market stranglehold they will do what they do best: ‘bring efficiencies into the supply chain’, which is west coast code for squeezing suppliers. Be careful what you wish for sports leagues.

MIDiA Research Predictions 2017: The Year Of The Platform

Following an 84% success rate for our 2016 Predictions report, we today launch our 2017 predictions report: ‘MIDiA Research Predictions 2017: The Year Of The Platform’. The report is immediately available to all MIDiA subscription clients and can also be purchased for individual download from our report store here.

Here are some highlights:

2016 was the year that video ate the world. 2017 will be the year of the platform, the year in which the tech majors will fight for pre-eminence in the digital economy, competing for consumer attention through formatting and distribution wars. Companies that are already using mobile Operating Systems to achieve global reach will take the next step, creating Mobile Life Ecosystems that both break out of the app silo walls and straddle them. Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, Microsoft, Apple and Google/Alphabet will be the main players. 2015 was about parking tanks on each other’s front lawns, in 2016 shots were fired, 2017 will be all-out war. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice assistance will be key battlegrounds and indeed will form the glue of Mobile Life Ecosystems.

Some of MIDiA’s other key predictions for 2017 are:

• Services are the new black: Maturing ‘phone and tablet markets mean that hardware companies will place a greater focus on digital content and services in 2017. Services are an opportunity to drive strong growth that will compensate for slowing device sales
• Ad market growing pains: Digital advertising inventory supply will exceed demand in 2017. Audience engagement will grow more quickly than advertisers’ appetite. Consequently, ad rates will decline with the bloating of the market by content farms accentuating the problem. Facebook will not be alone in seeing slowing ad revenues in 2017.
• A tech major will be hit with the first stage of an anti-trust suit: The incoming US Presidency has made its anti-trust inclinations clear. A likely early target will be the AT&T/Time Warner merger. The global-scale tech companies may be mature companies but their respective sectors are not. Regulation is one of the inevitable growing pains of maturing business sectors. Digital is next.
• Snapchat’s IPO will be digital’s canary in the mine: App store era unicorns and their attendant Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) will redefine the media and tech landscape. Not only will the success, or failure, of Snapchat’s IPO affect those of Uber and Spotify, poor showings could deflate the VC bubble andput an end to the grow-at-all-costs For the music industry, the stakes are even higher, as an under-achieving Spotify IPO would create a crisis in confidence in the entire streaming market.

Among our music predictions for 2017 are Spotify’s IPO and the subsequent start of a new generation of experiential streaming services, Tidal selling (probably to Apple) while Spotify closes out the year with around 55 million subscribers to Apple Music’s 30 million.