The 3 most powerful trends driving media disruption in the 2020s

The 2020s have already proven to be a decade of disruption for the media industry and media companies should not expect an escape any time soon. Consumers are continuing to pursue entertainment options from the comfort of their homes driven by the lingering of the pandemic.

Additionally, the gap between the consumption of media via traditional methods, including TV, newspaper, magazines, or radio, and digital methods, including social media, apps, podcasts, blogs, among others, continues to widen.  Insider Intelligence predicts that 60.2% of total US media time will be consumed via digital media methods. Media companies will have to continue to swiftly adapt to the changing trends of the industry and their consumers. Let’s look at three trends that will drive media disruption over the next decade.

New consumer expectations and behaviors

Younger consumers are transforming the media industry and have gone mobile. They have cut the cord from cable and switched to OTT providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime by the hundreds of millions. Older generation consumers are heavy users of Facebook, while their kids create and share TikTok videos. 

The massive impact of social media as illustrated in a leading magazine state 81% of U.S. adults use YouTube, while 69% use Facebook. Adults under 30, in particular, are the biggest users of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, Pew Research says.

The heavy usage of social media obliges local media organizations, such as TV and radio stations, to pay extra attention to localizing their coverage to maintain consumer attention. These changes will also affect how media companies create, distribute, and monetize their content.

Fortunately, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning make it easier for media companies to find and attract specific audience segments.

Evolving media ecosystems

Today, anyone and everyone can be a content creator. Whether through YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or another outlet, these platforms have simplified the content creation process to the push of a few buttons. In an era when users add 500 hours of video to YouTube every minute, according to Statisa.com, the impact of these platforms spreads far beyond the digital realm. Indeed, influencers are driving change in commerce, politics, and society at large.

The democratization of media brings freedom and influence for content creators; however, it produces immense pressure on media organizations to manage these environments where users can create and post nearly anything whenever they want. Technology may help companies oversee these environments, but they also need to develop strong policies for governance. 

Ultimately, the explosion of content-production platforms drives fierce competition for engagement. Again, media companies will need to leverage technology to survive and thrive in this competitive space. 

Emerging technologies

At the end of last year,  a Virtusa webinar titled Surviving Media Disruption in 2022 explained how 5G networks, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technologies will transform the media sphere. The webinar explored the potential media industry impacts of fatter bandwidth pipes, intelligent automation, and better security and verification. 

The webinar also discussed the potential of the “metaverse,” which summons imagery of people wearing headsets for virtual reality and gaming. Metaverse appears likely to get much bigger — evolving into a persistent, synchronous, and concurrent collaboration environment with wide interoperability. Analysts at Bloomberg concur, suggesting the metaverse is a market opportunity worth nearly $800 billion.

In the years to come, the metaverse could merge the physical and virtual worlds and become a destination for entertainment, digital commerce, and even healthcare.

How Virtusa helps media companies navigate disruption

At Virtusa, we help media companies deploy the tools and technologies they need to succeed in disruptive environments. Here’s a look at some of the ways we’ve done that:

• Developing an intelligent content recommendation engine that tracks users’ interests and behavior and sends them links to relevant products and services.
• Modernizing and migrating cloud applications and data payloads for a large broadcaster, using automation and next-generation technologies to boost efficiency and reduce costs.
• Designing and developing a blockchain-based, peer-to-peer TV audience platform for a media measurement company to gain consumer insights and identity recognition in an advertiser ecosystem.

This highlights just a small window of our capabilities. Contact us to find out how we can deliver the optimum mix of expertise and experience for your business needs.