Updated: Jun 22

By Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO

The recent BrandTrends survey, conducted in over 42 countries, shows that the distribution and content paradigms have shifted again in favor of the broadcasters.

Dubaï – June 15, 2022 – The BrandTrends Group has just published its most recent series of reports on the world’s most popular Entertainment brands. And they all point to a shift in focus from content to distribution.

According to the most recent BrandTrends surveys, seven of the top twenty most well-known top brands -spontaneous mentions, no list driving the responses- are streaming platforms rather than Entertainment brands themselves. And four of these streaming services also are among the top twenty most favorite Entertainment brands. Not to add that the diversity of brands people are familiar with is dwindling – 5% less in May 2022 – to the benefit of these major Entertainment content distribution platforms; especially focused on the most developed countries.

“It’s unquestionably fantastic news for streaming platforms, which are now fiercely battling for subscribers. These platforms have to keep their subscribers interested in their platform, getting them to migrate from one of their shows to another one.” explains Philippe Guinaudeau, CEO of BrandTrends. “However, it may not be as simple as that. We’ve just seen that it may not be as simple as I tell it, as Netflix has recently begun to lose subscribers” Guinaudeau noted.

The beauty of having so many live streaming services to choose from is there are dozens of combinations of powerful features. Streaming is of course most common on video-on-demand services and streaming TV, such as Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube. However, pushing strong, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify all offer music streaming services, while live-streaming video games is provided by Twitch. “The latter is becoming increasingly popular in our trackers”, Mr Guinaudeau continued.

For content creators, particularly the ‘smaller’ ones, and for each piece of material published, the risk is now lurking around the corner. People have absorbed all that much Entertainment stuff in the last two years. They found a lot of new content – new in the sense of ‘new to them,’ as some of it had been existing for a long time. As a corollary, their perspectives have enlarged. Consequently, show cancellations are on the rise.

Media companies with diverse businesses or innovative partnerships with third parties, such as those in the digital assets space (e.g., Nonfungible Tokens, or NFTs), will continue to seek to build their own flywheels, which deliver a portfolio of offerings to their streaming subscribers, drive new subscriptions, and add traction to D2C revenue models, extending customer relationships.

Let’s not forget that customers are increasingly shifting their attention to other and many displays, spending less time in front of the television. This adds to the problem of competing for their attention. This is now more than ever a multi-player battleground.

The new BrandTrends Entertainment reports are now available on 42 countries, with demographics spanning from infants to seniors.

The special add-on reports for the Licensing International members, on the most favorite brands, will be released later this month.