Hello again, Gustav here!

As you could read about last week Accedo had the honour of being on the Fast 50 list for the 6th year in a row! Then you also know that Oscar and I  had the opportunity to attend the event, which was great for getting a sense of which types of companies are growing and where the tech market is headed. Following that I would like to discuss some trends and predictions in the media industry that Deloitte mention in this year’s edition of the annual report, Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions (TMT). Deloitte’s TMT is a collection of predictions that Deloitte finds relevant and thinks will manifest within the coming 12-18 month of its release. The full report that I’m referencing can be found here and I would recommend at least skimming through it! Even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything, it can make you think about where future of the technology industry is headed, where large revenues can be made, and it contains some interesting statistics.

There are two predictions in the report I personally find especially interesting: Short form video: a future, but not the future, of television and The ‘generation that won’t spend’ is spending a lot on media content.

Short form video: a future, but not the future, of television talks about whether or not short form videos, mostly YouTube, can compete or even surpass regular TV consumption,  in regards to both time spent on each format and the revenues produced. When diving into the numbers and statistics, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not the case. I found the importance of distinguishing the concept of views and viewers interesting when measuring popularity and time spent on videos. I think it’s easy to get blinded by the huge numbers of views, amounts of shares and attentions certain short format videos get. So, even though a lot of YouTube stars and channels have staggering amounts of views they still fade into insignificance compared to regular ordinary TV. Gangnam Style (the most view video on YouTube, 2.1 billion) for instance has en estimate, in total, of 38 million hours by US residents. This only corresponds to approximately four-and-a-half episodes of the TV show, The Big Bang Theory in the same market. And this has 24 episode seasons. I really think this puts the difference between the mediums in perspective. So even though some private solo content providers, such as PewDiePie (with 40 million subs and 10,5 billion in total views), can be wildly successful regarding both number of views and revenues,  it doesn’t seem that short form videos will compete with regular television. Rather, they will act as an additional screen-based platform catering to a different need from traditional TV for the consumer.

Another thought that I have discussed with colleagues here at Accedo is whether premium content can ever reach and penetrate the channels that are dominated by these short format videos (e.g. social feeds (Facebook, Instagram), YouTube etc.)? This would of course present a lot of challenges, ranging from content distribution to digital rights management (DRM) etc. but I think it’s an interesting thought.

As I mentioned before, the other prediction that caught my eye was The ‘generation that won’t spend’ is spending a lot on media content. I found this interesting firstly because it focuses only on the generation I’m a part of: the millennials, which covers ages spanning 18-34. And also because I actually thought that this generation would be kind of reluctant to pay for their content, whether it’s newspapers, CD’s or cable TV. But the numbers provided in the report proves this totally wrong (at least regarding the cable TV part 😉 ). However, as the numbers provided are only focusing on North America, it makes it kind of hard for me to personally relate to, because of the huge differences with how TV distribution works compared to Sweden. I have to admit, though that a couple of years ago I really couldn’t see myself subscribing to several VOD services, yet now I find myself using both Viaplay and Netflix. I think the convenience of having services like this is simply too compelling for me not to use them and of course be willing to pay for them. I guess I also could see using services like these as a sort of user testing and market research, since I’m currently developing an app of the exact same kind. I guess you could call it the “app developers curse” sort of: always scrutinising, getting ideas, finding flaws and improvements and of course our app is always the better one 😉

So these were some of my thoughts about the predictions I found most interesting in the TMT 2015 Report. Hope you found them at lease somewhat interesting 🙂

Also: Linköpings students! Don’t forget to visit us at our booth on LINK-dagarna this Thursday! You can ask us all kinds of questions and we’ll tell you about what we do and how awesome it is to work as Accedo 🙂

Until next time!

/G