Industry Perspectives

The need for media and entertainment organizations to modernize their digital computing environment requires business and technology investments that innovate and streamline consumer and subscription processes. Ensuring digital effectiveness requires insights into how subscriber and billing processes enable revenue and financial outcomes. Effective digital environments can maximize customer investments, provide the subscriber experiences desired by consumers and optimize engagement through web, social and dedicated gaming platforms. How media and entertainment organizations unify their processes through applications and marketing investments requires analytics and technology that goes beyond traditional digital transformation and consulting approaches. Progress requires experience into gaining the return on the organization’s resources and digital technology investments.

The technological trend of the metaverse, merging virtualization and augmented reality, has steadily advanced in segments of the media and entertainment industry. Traditional aspects are trying to determine the demand to advance more readily in this support. Augmented reality is taking hold across industries, but virtualization of consumer and business experiences across media spectrums is enabling new forms of advertising and engagement opportunities that are critical to maintaining a competitive edge in coming years.

The advancement of artificial intelligence and analytics can help ascertain the impact and value of media consumed by customers and influencers and determine trends and opportunities to guide actions. With a significant volume of data in many formats and velocities of speed, storage requires new data lakes and platform technologies designed for operational and analytical demands. Utilizing data science and AI and ML Ops tools will help ensure the efficient use of data for insights. The blend of skills and technology needs to continuously evolve to ensure the proper utilization of what is possible across the organization.

Data in the digital era needs to be governed and secured to mitigate the risk of cyber threats. Governmental regulations that operate across geographic jurisdictions need to not just accommodated but prove they are in adherence with and are responsive to consumers and justified to auditing bodies. First- and second-party data needs to be managed and utilized in a manner that is known and trusted to protect organizations from legal pursuits. The need to better bind digital security and protect against cybersecurity and threats must be blended from CISO to CIO and ensure a more prudent approach is taken.

The media and entertainment industry is working through a portfolio of digital investments to ensure technology across the enterprise has the needed intelligence and provides value to subscribers. Modern technological advances should provide a higher level of efficiency in operational processes that have specific managerial and analytical needs for their applications. Differentiating subscriber and online experiences will require a reexamination of existing approaches that are not designed with retention and revenue optimization in mind. By 2024, one-half of media and entertainment organizations will adopt conversational computing technologies to improve efficiency across all selling and customer service channels for revenue optimization.

The media and entertainment industry has a significant opportunity to advance its digital effectiveness, gaining a competitive edge through technology. Organizations should assess the level of digital transformation required to utilize readily available advanced technological approaches to deliver the experiences customers expect from their media and entertainment services. Our analysis finds that digital business and technology investments must be aligned to support fundamental subscriber and financial performance and processes. Ventana Research recommends that media and entertainment organizations dramatically shift their technology investments to more agile and modern digital and cloud architectures that support the subscriber and unified customer efforts.