Marketing a game? Put enough focus on Discord and TikTok

MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

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.

Article | June 8, 2020

PlayStation 5 event date was previously postponed due to the intolerance and injustice that plagued the USA. While Sony lead the way, as a beacon of solidarity, several other companies followed. At that time, the best people could do is stand beside one another. However, recently some of the features of PS 5 were revealed. An advertisement on Twitch, along with an official post from PlayStation, confirmed the event date. Scheduled on June 11th, one can expect people to be extremely hyped up for this. The fact that everyone had to wait too long for PS 5 makes this news much more exciting.

VIRTUALIZATION

Article | May 20, 2021

MGM, which holds the largest film and TV library in Hollywood, is finally in play – and likely to be acquired by tech major and video streaming behemoth Amazon. With a rumoured price tag of $9 billion, the deal, while substantial, is merely equivalent to 8.3% of Amazon’s Q1 2021 earnings of $108.5 billion. Indeed, the 44% year-on-year (YoY) increase for its Q1 results alone would pay for the deal more than four times over. When it comes to investment capital to deploy, the tech majors led by Amazon and Apple are in a financial class of their own. This is the kind of deal that helps to explain why AT&T was so keen cut its losses and incur a $66 billion loss on its Warner Media assets by merging the former Time Warner media major with Discovery for $43 billion in cash and receiving 71% in equity in the new combined entity in return. It also follows on from Amazon’s 15.4x increase in what it is willing to pay to secure exclusive NFL Thursday Night Football coverage for its US Amazon Prime customers.

MEDIA AND BROADCASTING

Article | May 21, 2021

Music streaming contrasts sharply with video streaming. While the video marketplace is characterised by unique catalogues, a variety of pricing and diverse value propositions music streaming services are all at their core fundamentally the same product. When the market was in its hyper-growth phase and there were enough new users to go around, it did not matter too much that the streaming services only had branding, curation and interface to differentiate themselves from each other. Now that we are approaching a slowdown in the high-revenue developed markets, more is needed. Which is where Hi-Res comes in.