Digital Technology Trends of Media and Entertainment in 2021

Since spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has been stimulating structural challenges and trends that have long faced the media and entertainment industry. And digital transformation trends for media and entertainment industry focused on things like the increase in video ads, a clamour for digital experience, and a rise in mobile data usage due to such high demand. In 2021, all these things are likely to continue. Let's explore the biggest media and entertainment trends for 2021.

D2C Video Streaming

Video streaming started to witness a boost during the initial faces of lockdowns imposed worldwide. As people stayed indoors, they looked for diverse, meaningful, and quality video content. The change even triggered a downfall in the Pay-TV subscription for the US consumers.

Over the top (OTT) platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime offered the diversity of choices and cross-platform compatibility that TV viewers had not experienced earlier. The result was also streaming warfare. In the digital media industry, Disney was the first to retract its content from Netflix and offer it in D2C channel through its sister project Disney+. The move defined the trend of largest media houses receding content and hitting third party applications hard and brutally.

Focus on the Enterprise

It's easy to get stuck on the tech side of digital transformation when it comes to media and development due to today's streaming, mobile, real-time beacons and AI seem to have been developed specifically for this industry. Media and entertainment companies need to start focusing on building intelligent enterprises, not just cool and exciting media arms. It's high time that they start to implement enterprise resource planning to ensure higher efficiencies, lower spending, and more efficient work processes overall. That's why digital transformation is here. It's time to stop limiting one's interest to only the big and shiny, and moving it to the back of the house.

Ad-free Viewing Experience

Nowadays, people prefer OTT platforms because of the ad-free experience. The volume of consumable content increased and made retaining users easier. With top studios turning to video streaming, ad-supported content is expected to come back soon. This is partly because of the pitfall of keeping subscription fees competitive.

Ad-supported videos are already popular in markets such as India and China. But in the United States, platforms must curate enough user data for targeted advertising. OTT platforms are collecting and filtering every bit of data to deliver 'not annoying' ads.

Smarter Personalisation

Reports show that 40% of Millennials and Gen Z'ers are willing to pay for personalised content. They want the deeper engagement that digitisation can provide. As we have entered 2021, it is expected to see companies turn inward to figure out which content they are good at creating and which audiences they are targeting at a deeper level. From there, more niche communication and content development geared toward those audiences could be seen than today. It means a greater increase in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to draw out connection points so that audience's preference can be better analysed.

E-sports Broadcasting

The entertainment app development environment is galvanising its priorities as the global eSports revenues were predicted to hit USD 1.1 billion by the end of 2020. The lion's share of this money is from sponsorships (around USD 614.9 million) and media rights (approximately USD 176.2 million). Nevertheless, gaming events will be the centre of attention like 2020 for displaying the latest AR/VR. Besides, legalised sports betting will benefit from the incoming 5G technology. This is one of the reasons the United States has 5G towers popping up at sports stadium and related venues that will be a hotbed for placing bets. Entertainment software development can be easily turned in this direction to foster app development.