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MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

2021 media and entertainment industry outlook

May 1, 2021

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Since spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been accelerating structural challenges and trends that have long faced the media and entertainment (M&E) industry. Kevin Westcott, Deloitte’s US Tech, Media, and Telecom leader, explores the biggest media trends for 2021 and shares his entertainment industry analysis.

Spotlight

Zero Latency VR

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, Zero Latency is the pioneer and global leader in free-roam, warehouse-scale, multiplayer, virtual reality gaming.Free-roam Virtual Reality (FRVR) is the future of out-of-home entertainment, bringing unique social experiences and attracting a new, affluent audience.Zero Latency invented FRVR entertainment in 2014 and remains the category leader, providing the most experienced team, exclusive experiences, tested business model and largest network of venues.

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Instagram continues to perform strongly despite inconsistent brand identity

Article | June 30, 2021

Over the last few months Instagram has done its best to capitalise on the latest social media success tactics, often at the cost of its own original user proposition. The photo-sharing app for friends now offers Reels, imitating TikTok’s success. It has rolled out an option to hide Likes, the iconic feature which has characterised social media as a whole since inception. And it now is introducing ‘suggested posts’ to users’ feeds, sorted by topics a profile states they are interested in – potentially putting these ahead of photos and videos shared by profiles they actually follow. Directly mimicking TikTok, this seems to diverge very little in practice from hashtags, which are its original discovery feature. Instead, it seems to want to emulate the usability which younger users are familiar with from TikTok, in order to entice them to increase their Instagram engagement.

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MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

UGC vs. Premium: Is the video valuation bubble big enough to burst?

Article | May 21, 2021

The market disconnect between the proliferation of independent content creators and the consolidation of brand IP into the hands of ever-fewer major players is growing increasingly stark. On the one hand, independent artists are the fastest-growing sector of the music market. User-generated content (UGC) has proved a huge success during lockdown for the likes of TikTok and Roblox. The traditional brand celebrity spokesperson has ceded ground to the influencer, and even they to the micro-influencer. Content proliferation has driven increasingly niche content to niche audiences, finding smaller fan bases to resonate with instead of attempting the now nigh-impossible cut-through to mainstream popularity. This is the paradox of small: the long tail accounts for a growing share of content consumption, but the fractional economics of on-demand environments means that those in the long tail earn too little to be economically sustainable. Access to the means of distribution may have been democratised, but access to meaningful rights income has not.

Read More
MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

The productisation of music rights

Article | June 4, 2021

News that New York-based Pershing Square Tontine Holdings is planning to acquire 10% of UMGis the latest in a wave of financial transactions in the music rights space. Alongside this, Believe’s impending IPO has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen to the independent music sector in some time, and comes as part of a wave of IPOs (e.g.WMG,UMG), SPACs (e.g.Anghami,Reservoir) and no end of catalogue funds and acquisition vehicles. This trend, with good cause, has been referred to as the ‘financialisation of music’ but that only captures part of what is at play here. This is more than simply an influx of capital and debt; financial institutions are now becoming part of the plumbing of the music business, and in turn they are changing the definition of what constitutes success. This shift in objectives and desired outcomes has the potential to rebalance how the music industry operates.

Read More
VIRTUALIZATION

Netflix versus Amazon Prime Video – depth versus breadth

Article | June 10, 2021

The first half of 2021 has been a year of continued change and disruption for subscription video. The global incumbent subscription video on demand (SVOD) leaders, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, have been busy signalling to the financial markets how they intend to entrench their market dominance in light of the ongoing market acquisition pushes unleashed by the D2C disruptors following the D2C ‘big bang’ moment of Q4 2019 – Q2 2021. Netflix announced in January that it was no longer going to borrow on the financial markets to fund its day-to-day operations – specifically for its content acquisition budget, which is now driven predominately by commissioning original content for its service. This leaves the SVOD leader with $14.9 billion of outstanding long-term debt to service as it seeks to live within its means by commissioning future content from its ongoing cashflow. In Q1 2021 alone Netflix spent $500 million on servicing this debt pile versus $1.7 billion in net income generated over the same period.

Read More
VIRTUALIZATION

Instagram continues to perform strongly despite inconsistent brand identity

Article | June 30, 2021

Over the last few months Instagram has done its best to capitalise on the latest social media success tactics, often at the cost of its own original user proposition. The photo-sharing app for friends now offers Reels, imitating TikTok’s success. It has rolled out an option to hide Likes, the iconic feature which has characterised social media as a whole since inception. And it now is introducing ‘suggested posts’ to users’ feeds, sorted by topics a profile states they are interested in – potentially putting these ahead of photos and videos shared by profiles they actually follow. Directly mimicking TikTok, this seems to diverge very little in practice from hashtags, which are its original discovery feature. Instead, it seems to want to emulate the usability which younger users are familiar with from TikTok, in order to entice them to increase their Instagram engagement.

Read More
MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

UGC vs. Premium: Is the video valuation bubble big enough to burst?

Article | May 21, 2021

The market disconnect between the proliferation of independent content creators and the consolidation of brand IP into the hands of ever-fewer major players is growing increasingly stark. On the one hand, independent artists are the fastest-growing sector of the music market. User-generated content (UGC) has proved a huge success during lockdown for the likes of TikTok and Roblox. The traditional brand celebrity spokesperson has ceded ground to the influencer, and even they to the micro-influencer. Content proliferation has driven increasingly niche content to niche audiences, finding smaller fan bases to resonate with instead of attempting the now nigh-impossible cut-through to mainstream popularity. This is the paradox of small: the long tail accounts for a growing share of content consumption, but the fractional economics of on-demand environments means that those in the long tail earn too little to be economically sustainable. Access to the means of distribution may have been democratised, but access to meaningful rights income has not.

Read More
MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

The productisation of music rights

Article | June 4, 2021

News that New York-based Pershing Square Tontine Holdings is planning to acquire 10% of UMGis the latest in a wave of financial transactions in the music rights space. Alongside this, Believe’s impending IPO has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen to the independent music sector in some time, and comes as part of a wave of IPOs (e.g.WMG,UMG), SPACs (e.g.Anghami,Reservoir) and no end of catalogue funds and acquisition vehicles. This trend, with good cause, has been referred to as the ‘financialisation of music’ but that only captures part of what is at play here. This is more than simply an influx of capital and debt; financial institutions are now becoming part of the plumbing of the music business, and in turn they are changing the definition of what constitutes success. This shift in objectives and desired outcomes has the potential to rebalance how the music industry operates.

Read More
VIRTUALIZATION

Netflix versus Amazon Prime Video – depth versus breadth

Article | June 10, 2021

The first half of 2021 has been a year of continued change and disruption for subscription video. The global incumbent subscription video on demand (SVOD) leaders, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, have been busy signalling to the financial markets how they intend to entrench their market dominance in light of the ongoing market acquisition pushes unleashed by the D2C disruptors following the D2C ‘big bang’ moment of Q4 2019 – Q2 2021. Netflix announced in January that it was no longer going to borrow on the financial markets to fund its day-to-day operations – specifically for its content acquisition budget, which is now driven predominately by commissioning original content for its service. This leaves the SVOD leader with $14.9 billion of outstanding long-term debt to service as it seeks to live within its means by commissioning future content from its ongoing cashflow. In Q1 2021 alone Netflix spent $500 million on servicing this debt pile versus $1.7 billion in net income generated over the same period.

Read More
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Spotlight

Zero Latency VR

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, Zero Latency is the pioneer and global leader in free-roam, warehouse-scale, multiplayer, virtual reality gaming.Free-roam Virtual Reality (FRVR) is the future of out-of-home entertainment, bringing unique social experiences and attracting a new, affluent audience.Zero Latency invented FRVR entertainment in 2014 and remains the category leader, providing the most experienced team, exclusive experiences, tested business model and largest network of venues.

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