The $71.3 billion deal that allowed Walt Disney, Inc. to purchase large swaths of 21st Century Fox’s TV business closed just in time for the spring equinox. In making use of fiscal-year 2017 data, Disney stated in a regulatory filing that the new assets could very soon add approximately $19.3 billion in annual revenue and $1.6 billion in net income. For the 2017 fiscal year, Disney reported $55.1 billion in revenue and $9.4 billion in net income. In June, 2018, Comcast offered to buy the Fox assets for $65 billion, at the time outbidding Disney before the entertainment giant came back with its $71.3 billion new offer, driving Comcast out of the bidding war. Wall Street media analysts have praised the merger as lucrative in the long term for Disney, while skeptics are concerned about huge layoffs.
500,000 or more subscribers in North America alone are attracted to the video-on-demand service offered up by the BBC and ITV joint venture to be known as BritBox. Tony Hall, the director general of the UK public broadcaster, said at the Media & Telecoms “2019 & Beyond” conference, “Not long ago, traditional broadcasters and media organizations could each do our thing and expect audiences to make time to come to us. Now we must fit around their lives. Deliver value directly to them — or we all risk irrelevance. This is a profound shift.” In the UK, BritBox is anticipated to rival Netflix’s TV streaming service dominance.
2 billion people have Facebook accounts, and the world’s biggest social media company is taking its plans for its Facebook Watch streaming service seriously. Facebook is aggressively seeking to attract more creative talent to add content and programming to the new platform. BuzzFeed and Tastemade are getting paired up with such creators as Hannah Hart and Angela Kinsey. Already established to be streamed are a Conde Nast show with Keke Palmer and two Shots Studios projects with influencers Lele Pons and Rudy Mancuso. To a significant extent, Facebook is seeking to compete with YouTube.
$13.3 billion USD is how much home TV streaming services brought in during 2018, a rise of 28%, while around the globe the number of home digital TV subscriptions increased by 27% to 613.3 million and online video subscriptions surpassed cable for the first time in history. In the US, digital home entertainment spending went up 24% to $17.5 billion, while internationally the sector climbed 34% to $25.1 billion. Somewhat paradoxically, this all happened even as cinema ticket sales in the US rose 7% and reached a record $11.9 billion in revenues. DVD, Blu-ray disc, and cable subscription sales in the US all fell.
93% of European TV executives believe that fresh, original initiatives for TV advertising measurement, data, and metrics are desperately demanded for the European TV industry to stay competitive. This nearly unanimous view among the executives concerned has arisen in the context of the decline of linear TV consumption, the ascension of online video publishers, and the transition of broadcast TV into multiplatform. Adobe Advertising Cloud managing director Phil Duffield says, “in its current fragmented state, the TV industry doesn’t enable advertisers to offer a consistent experience across channels, which has a direct impact on customer relationships.”
