The entertainment industry is driven by technology, now more than ever before. From cutting-edge special effects developed for movies to virtual reality gaming and streaming media – technology is everywhere!
The pandemic also proved to industries how heavily reliant customers are on technology. Even outlets that had remained analogue such as concerts and theatres had to make way and find new ways to turn digital. There’s no way around it – if the entertainment industry wants to survive, it has to adapt to new technologies.
Here are the most important trends that will impact the entertainment industry in the next few years.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, will continue to place its impact on the entertainment industry. The three heavily important functions are recommendation, voice recognition and media automation. The recommendation technology is heavily used by streaming services like Netflix to accurately surface content with audience that will find it most valuable according to their most watched content. In fact, 80% of Netflix’s content delivery is achieved through recommendation.
Voice recognition is also becoming increasingly popular with an audience becoming more comfortable with communicating with services. Naturally, companies will want to improve their natural language algorithms to better understand humans.
Content automation is also being heavily utilised in today’s world to generate snippets of movies viewed as thumbnails and/or previews that will most likely appeal to customers.
Virtual reality
Virtual reality is also at the top of the list, becoming more and more popular as the costs of hardware and software associated with it continue to drop. Many of the current applications and entertainment involve some kind of VR element such as Pokemon Go, making games feel more lifelike and adding more value to users.
We can see VR working clearly in the casino industry in which online casinos are providing a mix between offering new slot sites in the UK but also amalgamating these games with live casino features to offer a healthy mix to gamblers looking for a more lifelike experience.
The metaverse
Especially due to the pandemic, virtual events, shows, and performances have grown in popularity. This spike the interest in the metaverse world – an online and interconnected digital environment in which people can meet and socialise digitally. Last year, there were a number of concerts that happened in the metaverse including an Ariana Grande concert and a Bruno Mars one inside Fortnite, an online game. The metaverse is rising to be the venue in which we share entertainment experiences with friends from the comfort of our own home.
NFTs
NFTs are non-fungible tokens used to record the ownership of digital assets and enable unique digital content. These have mostly been used to enable sales of digital artwork, however, NFTs will surely rise in popularity to include other industries such as IP management and buying and selling concert tickets, for example. NFTs have an alluring exclusivity around them which will surely entice many customers.
The new social media
Social media is constantly evolving, and we will always welcome ‘the next big thing’ even though Facebook is still reigning in its popularity in most countries. Social media 2.0 is said to exclude the negative connotations with traditional social media such as data and privacy concerns, fake news, identity theft, trolling and bullying, and others. It is also likely that content in social media 2.0 will be more bite-sized through platforms like YouTube and TikTok since the way that consumers are consuming news is drastically changing.