From Ownership to Access

Last Wednesday we held the third MIDiA Quarterly forum, exploring the shift from ownership to access across different media industries. In addition to MIDiA analyst presentations we had panellists from Sky, The Economist, Beggars Group, Reed Smith and Readly. The event was held at The Ministry in London and was a great success. Be sure to make it to our next one! Here are some of the key themes we explored.

Change is a coming

We opened with three quotes that summarise the tensions and transformations taking place in the digital content marketplace:

 ‘The fine wines of France are not merely content for the glass making industry’, Andrew Lloyd-Webber

‘We’re competing with sleep…sleep is my greatest enemy’, Reed Hastings, Netflix

‘Content may still be king but distribution is the queen and she wears the trousers’, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed

All three quotes represent very different worldviews and illustrate how different things can look from the perspective of the companies being disrupted, those doing the disruption and those building businesses to harness the disruption. All three viewpoints are simultaneously valid, but the media landscape is changing at rapid pace, and fighting a rear-guard action against change only gives the disruptors a freer rein to, well, disrupt.

Across most media industries – music, video and news especially, the future of content monetisation will be built around advertising for the mass market and subscriptions for the aficionados, while additional opportunities exist for one-off transactions within both environments (e.g. Tencent live streaming  Chinese boyband TFBoysand Epic Games selling $100 million a month of virtual items in Fortnite). What is going as a mainstream proposition is selling physical media, though niche markets for collectables will thrive—ironically exactly because of the demise of physical media. In an age without shelves full of CDs, DVDs and games, collectors want a physical manifestation of their tastes.

Music and video are plotting the most directly comparable paths towards access-based models, though there are also some very telling differences:

• Scale:Globally there were 206 million music subscribers at the end of 2017, compared to 452 million video subscribers. But while subscriptions represented 45% of retail music revenues, it was just 12% of pay-TV revenues. Music though is a far smaller industry than pay-TV (11% of the size), so like-for-like comparisons aren’t always that useful.
• Concentration:What is worth comparing though, is the degree of market concentration. In music, the top four subscription services account for 72% of subscribers, compared to just 54% for video. And while the long tail for music services isn’t very, well, long, in video there is a vast number of smaller services: there are around 60 different services in the US alone.
• Variety:While music services largely offer the same catalogue, with the same usage terms at the same price, video is defined by diversity and exclusives. Using the US as an example again, more than half of the services are niche – such as Korean drama, 4K nature, horror, reality – and there are 23, yes 23, different price points.

Aside the different heritages of these industries – consumers are used to paying for different slices of TV content, there is another key reason for the differences: rights holder distribution. In music three big companies account for the majority of revenues; in TV there are dozens of key studios and networks. This means that in video, the distribution companies can play rights holders off each other and effectively set the pace of change. In music, the major record labels shape the market.

This dynamic is what Clayton Christensen outlined in the Innovator’s Dilemma. There are two key types of innovation:

1. Sustaining innovations:the smaller, more evolutionary changes that companies make to improve their existing products. Every company does this if they can, it’s how to maintain the status quo and grow revenues predictably
2. Disruptive innovations:these are dramatic, industry-altering changes that rarely come from the incumbents but instead from disruptive new entrants. P2P file sharing was the big one that shook the TV and music industries. TV responded by fighting free with free, by launching services like iPlayer, ABC.com and Hulu. The music industry responded by licensing to the iTunes Music store. One embraced disruption, one fought it.

Talking of disruption, the big existential threat media companies will have to face over the coming decade, is ceding power, willingly or otherwise, to the tech majors (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook). Europe’s Article 13aims to offset some of the growing reach of the tech majors, but ultimately these companies will shape the future of media, across both ad supported and subscription models.

The tech majors generated $40.7 billion in ad revenue in Q1 2018 alone, including around $2 billion for Amazon, the global advertising revenue powerhouse that many still aren’t paying enough attention to. The tech majors have already sucked away much of the news industry’s audience and ad revenues; with assets such as YouTube and IGTVthey are competing for radio and TV too. But it is the content and services revenue that media companies need to pay most attention to. With $16.9 billion in Q1 alone – nearly the same as the recorded music market for the entirety of 2017, this is a sector that all four tech majors are taking seriously, very seriously. And even though Facebook is a late arrival to the party, it is making up for lost time with its new music offeringand evolving video strategy.

The reason all this matters for media companies is that the strategic objectives of the tech major are rarely aligned with those of media companies. The tech majors each use media as a means to an end, a tool for driving their core strategy. Access based models underpin the content strategies of these companies who often control distribution and access to consumers via tools such as app stores, mobile operating systems, search and social platforms. Thus, the shift from ownership to access could also translate into a shift towards a tech major dominated media world.