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Showing posts from February, 2016

MWC 2016: Towards distributed personal devices

Mobile World Congress is not typically a place where innovation is overt. The industry comes here to talk shop and make deals, not to imagine a radical future. In the handset market this means taking steps to assure a place in the shrinking ranges of the big buyers, who're generally trying to slim down the range they show customers to improve the customer experience. This means not stepping too far from what customers understand right now. No innovation & no disruption. But there are exceptions. Sony, for example showed three products that disaggregate the handset to make it more useful. They showed off a tiny earpiece that enables voice and gesture control of the smartphone that it's Bluetooth tethered to. Although still slightly nerdy-looking, it potentially removes the need to constantly pull out a phone or tap a watch. Even more radical was the companion camera device. This moves the camera phone to a lanyard or shirt clip. Again, a modicum of AI enables the ca...

How much does YouTube contribute to the UK creative economy?

YouTube and the multichannel network (MCN)/ vlogger ecosystem it supports represents the largest current emerging media type. By my estimate, YouTube streams 4.2Bn hours of content a month, much of which (probably) ends up substituting for time spent with traditional media. But all of the coverage of the platform focuses on whether YouTube itself is profitable for Google, rather than the impact of a global platform on local creativity. Just as was my intent with the report we published on TV last year, which highlighted the impact of accelerating sports rights spending on the creative economy , I'm now looking at the effect of a global platform that exchanges local viewing, flowing directly to local creatives, for consumption of global channels, which goes into international pockets. Numbers on YouTube are really very hard to obtain as the platform is not independently reported on by Alphabet, Google, or anyone else. Even estimates of its top line revenues vary wildly, being as...