Wednesday 16 January 2019

$322m was spent in Apple's App Store on New Year's Day 2019

"Apple has revealed that App Store customers worldwide set new spending records over the holidays, wrapping up a record-breaking year. App Store spending topped $1.22 billion (€1.07bn) between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. Customers also spent over $322 million on New Year’s Day 2019 alone, setting a new single-day record.
“The App Store had a record-breaking holiday week and New Year’s Day. The holiday week was our biggest week ever with more than $1.22 billion spent on apps and games, and New Year’s Day set a new single-day record at more than $322 million,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Thanks to the inspiring work of our talented developers and the support of our incredible customers around the world, the App Store finished off an outstanding 2018 and kicked off 2019 with a bang.”"

Fortnight has an estimated 200m players, and has generated an estimated $3bn in profits

"[In] September of 2017, Fortnite’s second iteration, “Battle Royale,” hit the web, and went on to spend much of 2018 going viral. The game’s concept is pretty simple: 99 players are dropped into a virtual battleground, at which point they gather weapons and digitally fight to the death until one player is left. That player wins.
As of today, there are an estimated 200 million Fortnite players worldwide, and the game can be played on consoles, PCs and iOS and Android smartphones.
“Fortnite is everywhere because the barrier to entry is so low,” said Jeff Gerstmann, editor-in-chief of Giant Bomb, a video game review site. “It’s available everywhere. Almost anyone can play it on a phone, anywhere they can play games. By virtue of it all over the place and free to play and a very popular type of game in terms of Battle Royale stuff, it’s kind of a perfect storm. It really all came together for them in a big way.”
A big way, and a lucrative way. Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, has not released official figures on how much revenue or profit the game has brought in, but according to sources with knowledge of the business, it’s roughly $3 billion."

Netflix won five awards at the 2019 Golden Globes

"Streaming giant Netflix came away with a leading five Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton ceremony on January 6th.
Netflix original Roma won best foreign language movie, and its Mexican-born filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron took the prize for best director. Its series The Kominsky Method won the award for best comedy while star performer Michael Douglas won best actor in a comedy series. British thriller series Bodyguard, which aired on Netflix outside the UK, also earned a nod with Richard Madden winning best actor in a drama series."
Source:  Advanced Television, 7th January 2019

More than 100m devices with Amazon Alexa have been sold

"More than 100 million devices with Alexa on board have been sold. That’s the all-too-rare actual number that Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, Dave Limp, revealed to me earlier this week. That’s not to say Amazon has finally decided to be completely transparent about device sales, however. While the company claims it outstripped its most optimistic expectations for the Echo Dot during the holiday season, Limp wouldn’t give a number for that. Instead, Limp says, Amazon is sold out of Dots through January, despite "pushing pallets of Echo Dots onto 747s and getting them from Hong Kong to here as quickly as we possibly could.""
Note - I'd assume that at least 95% of these would be Echo devices

Thursday 3 January 2019

Video games account for more than half of UK entertainment market

"The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the UK's entire entertainment market, according to a new report.
The industry is worth £3.86bn ($4.85bn) - more than double its value in 2007 - said the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).
That makes it more lucrative than video and music combined.
The success is largely down to three games: Fifa 19, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
The games market has grown, despite the fact that the physical console and PC games market shrank slightly in 2018, and digital also had a modest 12.5% growth.
Chief executive of ERA, Kim Bayley said: "The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment. Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest.""
Source:  BBC News, 3rd January 2019

45m Netflix accounts watched Bird Box in the first seven days


Note - Presumably this isn't 45m out of the 130m paying accounts but includes all the of the users of an account - e.g. many accounts have 5 user logins.