Blog: metaverse

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

The rise of the IP bank

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Tim Mulligan

10 Apr 2024

Post-lockdown saw the rise of media fusion into mainstream media formats, with games titles such as The Last of Us being made into episodic TV series. This followed the metaverse V1 experiences of live streamed music concerts from the likes of Travis Scott and Marshmello in Epic Game’s Fortnite .

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The future is interoperability: Why Threads could beat Twitter through the Fediverse

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Hanna Kahlert

12 Jul 2023

While Elon Musk has been posturing public beef with Mark Zuckerberg (challenging him to a cage match, practicing with former MMA champions, public callouts on Twitter, requesting very personal measurements), Zuckerberg has responded in a more traditional way (aside from his own training pictures) with the launch of Threads, Twitter’s biggest competitor to-date.

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Meta’s VR push should focus on the reality of the average consumer

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Ben Woods

25 Apr 2023

virtual reality

The tipping point for virtual reality headsets remains elusive. Last year’s market hype around the metaverse suggested widespread adoption was within reach, only for Sony to reportedly dial down its production plans for the PlayStation VR2.

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Is the quality of games going down?

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Perry Gresham

24 Feb 2023

trueachievements

“Things aren’t like they used to be”, a common refrain of anyone over the age of about 25, is a sentiment especially prevalent amongst gamers today. Is this blind nostalgia, or have games really gotten worse? To investigate this, I looked into user rating data from TrueAchievements.

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The metaverse transition: Fortnite

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Samuel Griffin

19 Jan 2023

The metaverse transition: Fortnite Unreal Engine has been at the bleeding edge of digital development since its release, being fundamental to the development of household titles such as The Witcher , Fortnite , Disney’s The Mandalorian, and HBO’s Westworld.

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The future lies beyond tech – a long(er) read

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Hanna Kahlert

14 Dec 2022

As entertainment companies start planning their next big steps for the coming year, the success and failure of their strategic decisions will hinge on one big, and perhaps surprising, existential question : is this it for the tech industry? Planning for 2023 seems to mean planning for disruption, and this is no easy thing to do – especially given the changes already wrought by the last three years of predominately virtual working.

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Welcome to the Metaverse, where audience fragmentation reigns

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Ben Woods

8 Dec 2022

In Ernest Cline’s dystopian novel Ready Player One , the metaverse unfurls as a virtual universe where choice over identity and experience are boundless. Such is the seamless experience of Cline’s ‘Oasis’ that it competes, and wins, when pitted against conventional reality.

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iHeart brings podcasts to the metaverse – two niche formats looking for mainstream growth

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Annie Langston

8 Sep 2022

iHeartMedia is (somewhat) of a sleeping giant in the audio battle. Although Spotify has taken centre stage in the audio market, iHeart has also transitioned its traditional radio offerings to digital audio – just without splashy mainstream headlines.

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Web 3.0 is a lane, not a highway

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Mark Mulligan

2 Sep 2022

Facebook was not the first web 2.0 company, but it was the one that took it mainstream to a global audience. Consumers’ digital lives would never be the same again. Whereas web 1.0 had enabled them to visit and read websites, much like a digital evolution of newspapers and magazines, Facebook enabled consumers to participate, to comment, upload photos, converse, etc.

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The trials and tribulations of virtual reality

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Perry Gresham

26 Aug 2022

virtual reality

The new world of virtual reality (VR) has felt closer over the past ten years than ever, but is still just over the horizon. VR remains niche The main sticking point is adoption: currently just under one in ten US gamers has a VR headset, dropping to around 1 in 20 in western Europe and even less in other tracked nations (MIDiA Research survey data).

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A counterculture music industry is emerging — welcome to the platform era

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Tatiana Cirisano

5 Jul 2022

What do TikTok’s distribution tool , Universal Music Group’s samples marketplace , and Snoop Dogg’s virtual marijuana have in common? On the surface, not much. But beneath, these news headlines are just three more recent reflections of what MIDiA has identified as a new iteration of the music business.

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What Snapchat is getting right about the future (and why music should pay attention)

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Tatiana Cirisano

6 May 2022

The music industry has spent the last few years studying the ins and outs of new platforms like TikTok and Twitch, with good reason. But the decade-old Snapchat increasingly appears to be social media’s dark horse.

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Meta’s 2024 vision for AR glasses demonstrates the tech barrier to the metaverse

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Hanna Kahlert

13 Apr 2022

Mark Zuckerberg is pushing for an ‘iPhone moment’ with his company’s Project Nazare, announcing AR glasses due to come in 2024, with hints at upgrades already in the works for 2026 and 2028. Not only would this cast his company in a new light, embattled as it is by regulatory attempts and negative PR, which the rebrand from Facebook to Meta has failed to shake entirely, but it would also place Meta at the ideal position to facilitate the interaction between consumers and the proposed metaverse – an underpinning for the predicted Web 3.

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The metaverse hype will need to account for screen fatigue in an increasingly digital world

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Hanna Kahlert

24 Mar 2022

Media and Marketing

Cultural trends

The last two years have completely reoriented the dynamic between digital-first and in-person life. Digital entertainment has boomed under successive lockdowns, streaming has dominated consumption formats, and creation has been shifted from big studios to at-home DIY – in music, video, art, and even games.

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Why Instagram will introduce NFTs to the gig economy in a big way

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Hanna Kahlert

16 Mar 2022

In a conversation at SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg dropped that Instagram was going to be incorporating NFTs in the ‘near term’, pending some technological tweaks. While he was sparse on the detail, initial stages would likely allow users to bring their existing NFTs on the platform, and later on, potentially it would become possible to mint NFTs on the platform itself.

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Time for a metaverse reality check

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Hanna Kahlert

23 Feb 2022

Be it a realistic phenomenon or simply escapism, the digital discourse of 2022 has been populated by a number of shiny new terms that seem to have wooed the digital entertainment world. NFTs. Web 3.0. The Metaverse .

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Why the rise of a (former) political leader in the ranks of Meta spells regulatory compromise ahead

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Hanna Kahlert

17 Feb 2022

This Wednesday, Nick Clegg – former MP and deputy Prime Minister of the UK – was promoted to President of Global Affairs at Meta, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg himself. According to Zuckerberg, “Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work.

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Web 3.0 will be social-first

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Hanna Kahlert

6 Dec 2021

Fame has now been replaced by one-hit overnight viral sensations, niche can now be of more strategic value than mainstream , and 16-19-year-old males are buying high fashion on Fortnite. Digital-first entertainment has not only changed the ‘how’ of success, but also the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

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Why a VR metaverse is not the future of digital

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Hanna Kahlert

5 Nov 2021

consumer insight

Amid a perfect storm of government scrutiny, potential anti-trust legislation, a whistle-blower, and social media disruption at the hands of burgeoning creator tools (like TikTok), Facebook – sorry, Meta – has announced its grand plan to build out the new future of the digital frontier: the metaverse.

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Facebook is about to disrupt itself out of existence…again

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Mark Mulligan

29 Oct 2021

Facebook’s rebranding to Meta can be interpreted in many ways. It can be seen as: following Google / Alphabet’s lead in communicating a new chapter in its business; putting distance between the company and its most well-known app, ahead of it beginning to decline; shifting the story away from whistleblower and ethics narratives; signalling a major strategic reboot.

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