Predicting the Future of Media and Entertainment

Visualizing the Future of Media and Entertainment

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Over your lifetime, the consumption of media and entertainment has already changed drastically.

For Boomers and Gen Xers, the shift has been earth-shattering. Both generations will remember a time before mainstream computing when TV was dominated by the Big Three TV networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS), and newspapers and magazines were the main way to stay in touch with what was happening.

Even millennials have seen fundamental shifts in consumption of media. After all, they experienced the rise of social media, online news, streaming, and digital video firsthand. Many of them will remember their college getting access to Facebook for the first time, the death of Napster, and the funny sounds their 28.8k modem made as it struggled to successfully download a single image file.

The modern landscape of media is very different than it was back then – and the coming years will see even more prolific changes.

The Future of Media and Entertainment

Today’s infographic comes to us from Raconteur, and it showcases multiple sets of data that help to illustrate the direction that media is heading. This includes the growth rates of various media and entertainment sectors, TV viewing trends, and social media use.

Here are some of the key trends that we found to be compelling:

Annualized Media Sector Growth (Minus GDP Growth) from 2016-2021

Media sector	Annual Growth (minus GDP growth)
Online Video	6.0%
Online Advertising	4.3%
Video Gaming	2.7%
Out-of home Ads	-1.7%
Music	-2.0%
TV Advertising	-2.8%
Radio	-3.4%
Books	-4.5%
Magazines	-6.0%
Newspapers	-8.3%

Online video (6.0%), online ads (4.3%), and video gaming (2.7%) are the only sectors growing at a rate faster than GDP growth.

But while digital video use is growing, it’s not going to takeover TV anytime soon:

Daily Minutes Watching TV vs. Digital Video

Year	TV (Minutes watched)	Digital Video (Minutes Watched)
2016	245	49.5
2017	238	54.3
2018	230	58.7
2019	222	62.5
2020	219	65.3

Lastly, here are some figures on the future of media and entertainment that are particularly interesting:

• By 2021, Cisco says that 82% of all internet traffic will stem from digital video
• There will be 26.3 million VR headsets shipped in 2022, up from 100,000 in 2016
• The eSports market will jump 152% in size by 2021
• By 2021, there will be 650 million subscribers to services like Amazon Prime or Netflix
• 5G latency is expected to be 0.001 seconds, which is 15-60x faster than 4G

It’s fair to say that in another decade, media and entertainment will be much less recognizable than what it looks like today.