Digitalisation accelerates in entertainment and media industries

Consumer habits can take a lifetime to learn – but just a lockdown to lose, says PwC. According to the consultancy's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2020–2024, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and amplified ongoing shifts in consumers’ behaviour, pulling forward digital disruption and forging industry tipping points that wouldn’t have been reached for many years.

PwC’s 21st annual edition of the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook is an online source of global analysis for consumer and advertising spending. It has found that digitalisation, one of the major forces shaping all industries, has been intensified by safe distancing and mobility restrictions. As a result, the entertainment and media (E&M) world in 2020 has become more remote, more virtual, more streamed, more personal and – for now at least – more centred on the home than anyone anticipated at the start of the year.

One of the trends in the research is that the ongoing decline in global newspapers and consumer magazines has accelerated sharply in 2020, with overall revenues in Singapore slumping by 13%. Consumer magazines are suffering the most.

That said, digital offers a silver lining: a tipping point for consumer magazines in 2024 will see their global revenue from digital advertising overtake that from print advertising. A long-running transition in newspapers from print to digital has also been fast-forwarded several years, cutting into papers’ print revenues.

With people staying at home, over-the-top (OTT) video has seen global revenue surge by 26% in 2020 with the Singapore numbers climbing ahead at 32%. And it is forecast to keep rising strongly in the coming years, doubling in size from US$234 million in 2019 to US$477 million in 2024. With more people home, the video games segment has also grown quickly in Singapore amidst the crisis. The segment shows 9% growth this year will remain one of the fastest growing segments going forward to 2024.

Source: PwC. Graphic illustrating the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook.

Oliver Wilkinson, Entertainment and Media Leader, PwC Singapore said: "What is consistent with the outlook from prior years is the wide variance of performance between different segments, particularly given the acceleration of digital media adoption at the expense of traditional. It is in this sense that the pandemic has brought the future forward."

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*As PwC continually updates the online Global Entertainment & Media Outlook data, the data at the time of writing may not align with the data found online. Please refer to the online Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2020–2024 as the most up-to-date source of consumer and advertising spend data.