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🦠 Omicron ruffles feathers in the share market
🏆 Channel 7 wins 2021 TV ratings...or did they?
🤑 Niantic, the creator of Pokémon Go, is now worth US$9 billion
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Here's everything you need to know today - in under 3 minutes.
🦠 Omicron ruffles feathers in the share market
🏆 Channel 7 wins 2021 TV ratings...or did they?
🤑 Niantic, the creator of Pokémon Go, is now worth US$9 billion
IKEA, the Swedish furniture lords are about to become landlords. This crew are renting out a teeny, tiny 10-square metre apartment in Tokyo...that'll only cost $1 a month to rent.
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Background: Let's rewind to March 2020. The Weeknd's Blinding Lights was topping charts...and, oh yeah, the stock market crashed thanks to COVID.
What happened: When COVID landed, share markets worldwide suffered their largest declines since the 2008 GFC. Fast-forward to today, and just as the world was beginning to open back up...a new variant of the virus comes a'knockin.
What else: Omicron, which sounds like it could be also be the next tech unicorn outta Silicon Valley, has caused massive sell-offs in US and Aussie markets. Thankfully, the markets have recovered a bit.
💡A market sell-off occurs when a large volume of shares are sold in a short period of time. When this happens, it causes the price of those shares to drop dramatically.
💡Market sell-offs can be triggered by a few things. It could be:
💡Here's hoping we don't see as dramatic a drop this time as we did back in 2020.
Background: Every year, TV broadcasters compete to be the most-watched television network...Ya know, because more viewers = more reach = more money from advertisers.
What happened: Channel 7 ended the year with a 38.6% share of the commercial audience - ahead of Nine at 37.8%. But Nine reckon they won, because they took out the top spot for prime time.
What else: When it comes to total viewers (including other channels like 7flix...7mate...) 7 actually won. And it's largely thanks to a growth of its Broadcast Video On Demand platform 7plus.
💡Broadcast Video On Demand (or BVOD for short) is content created by conventional broadcast media (i.e. Channel 7, 9 and 10)...but it's then made available online and on-demand (i.e. 7plus, 10play and 9Now).
💡Audiences are shifting from linear programming (i.e. viewing a program at a particular time on live TV) to viewing whatever they want, whenever they want and however they want. Netflix style.
💡BVOD is increasingly where the magic happens for all networks. In fact, BVOD consumption was up nearly 40% in 2020 alone. And it seems like 7 read the BVOD playbook a little earlier than the others.
Background: Niantic are a US based startup that was initially developed within Google, before spinning off on their own in 2015.
What happened: Since then, Niantic have grown to become a multibillion-dollar company. And even if you haven't heard of them...you've likely heard of their famous creation: Pokémon Go.
What else: Pokémon Go came out back in 2016, and to this day, still has more than 800,000 daily players. Now, the company have raised a further US$300 million...to be valued at US$9 billion. They plan to use the cash to build what they call the 'real world metaverse'.
💡The business world tends to gravitate towards 'sexy' themes. Think: electric vehicles, AI, cybersecurity (or a mix of all of these). Since Facebook rebranded to Meta, the metaverse is ALL THE RAGE.
💡But the term metaverse means different things to different people. On one end of the spectrum, you've got Facebook (aka Meta), who wants to create the metaverse with virtual reality headsets (ie solely behind a screen).
💡On the other end, you've got Niantic, who want to see the metaverse with augmented reality - overlaying the digital world into our physical world to improve real-word experiences.
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