The next ten years of wealth creation in media will equally be determined by mastery of emerging platforms.

By Rodric David

OVUM, a leading analyst house across converging media, telecoms, and IT markets, recently released its research analysis on the coming 10 years in the media business from the consumer perspective. Based on the content of Rob Gallagher’s piece in Ovum, I think we can expect that the next decade of wealth creation in media will be focused on the content creators who maximize the technological capacity of mobile devices to engage audiences in new and innovative ways.

Lets cut right to a few of the highlights of the post: Media and entertainment revenue is forecast to grow 43% up to 1.6 trillion by 2025, and in that time digital media’s share of that pie is expected to triple from 12% to 41%. Paid media services won’t go under, but advertising will overtake them as the primary revenue source, $680 billion of it coming from digital. Lastly, the big winners will be those platforms, content creators, and content providers who leverage big data to inform the course of their creative pipeline.

When we reflect this question back to 2005, monoliths like facebook, youtube, netflix, twitter and even the iphone were either non-existent or negligible. But now, they form the Stonehenge the stars move around.  As time lapses, content creators and providers need not have an exact plan to handle the  eruptions of future unknowns, but rather, adopt core principles around user experience and mobile platforms, which can both adapt to change and yet appeal to those eternal human constants: Emotions and Time. There is no truer statement than ‘Content is King’, and the content that rises to the top can come from anyone, anywhere.

If the world got turned upside down since 2005, then in the next decade it’s going to get turned completely inside out.

It’s been said big ships turn slowly, but in a world where new platforms emerge as fast as weather changes, where content creators and content consumer are becoming increasingly synonymous , the dominant ships will be the ones for whom change isn’t a storm, it’s fuel.

The global box office of $38 Billion is an  entire order of magnitude shy of the $353 Billion global TV and digital ad spending in 2015, which OVUM expects to reach $660 Billion by 2025. But, despite these impressive numbers, resistance to change is yet another human constant, and many in the industry continue to place their bets on the slowly sinking subscription model rather than advertising funded distribution.

I will address this blind spot in an upcoming article on why I think that the subscription model is antithetical to audience engagement and monetization.