Industry Watch - Apple disrupting TV market, YouTube’s eight content categories, Mobile World Congress 2019

Rumours abound that Apple will launch a new Apple TV service on March 25th where it will be unveiled alongside the company’s news subscription service.

There is a lot of speculation surrounding the details of the ambitious TV service, most of which is covered here by digitaltrends.com

For those short on time - a tl;dr summary:

Apple’s new TV service is unlike anything on the market today: much more than a streaming service, its vision hopes to encompass both live TV and on-demand video, be accessible on virtually any screen, and deliver a deeply personalised viewing experience based on habits, where you live and where you are when watching.

The service aims to become the ultimate video aggregator, striking deals with cable, satellite, streaming and broadcasting players.

Subscription prices are rumoured to be $15 per month, while Apple plans to take its usual 30% cut of revenue from 3rd party content. How this will affect negotiations with Netflix, Hulu, HBO, etc remains to be seen. And if these big players aren’t onboard at launch, it will certainly affect sign-ups.

Apple is expected to launch a new version of the Apple TV set-top box which could also allow personal viewer videos to be stored thereby creating a highly individual Apple TV video catalogue.

All in all, this could redefine TV just as iPhone redefined mobile phones.

Breaking down YouTube



We’ve all read the YouTube viewer stats: nearly 2 billion monthly active YouTube users, 5 billion videos watched per day, 300 hours of video uploaded a minute, etc.

tubefilter.com's Matt Gielen wrote an in-depth article this month on the Taxonomy of YouTube videos, breaking down the billions of videos into 8 formats. Amazing work.

Here are the eight formats:

Listicle, Explainer, Commentary, Interview, Music Video, Challenge, Reaction and Narrative.

A How-To or Educational video sits under Explainer, a blog or unboxing would be a Commentary piece, a web series or brand film would be filed under Narrative, and so on.

The point being that as a brand / publisher wanting to create original content for YouTube, we should first position our video into one of the 8 format structures.

MWC 2019



Finally, Mobile World Congress 2019 kicked off this week in Barcelona. Long-gone are the days when this was just about mobile phones, although it still clearly is in part as witnessed by the interest in extremely expensive foldable phones.

Do we want this? I’ve never actually wished my phone could fold into a tablet but have wished my laptop could fold into a phone….

At MWC, we’ve been through car launches (throwback to me producing satellite TV interviews for Bill Ford at the B-Max unveiling) and now AI, robotics and next-gen Virtual Reality.

It’s exciting times indeed for brands wanting to create immersive video content for customers.

Broadcasting also gets a mention via 5G announcements from all the big boys with Samsung broadcasting the event across its 5G network to 280 hotels in Barcelona and Intel demonstrating its first 5G network to be deployed at the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games.

If you would like to produce original content for YouTube or other platforms, talk about immersive Virtual Reality / Mixed Reality projects or carry out video content creation & broadcast PR at industry events like MWC, please call Mark Jones on +44 7967 353 727