Virtual Realities — 4 Ways Covid-19 Will Forever Change Media and Entertainment
There’s a growing sense that the Covid-19 pandemic will prove a pivotal moment in human history, not unlike 9/11 or the Great Depression. A moment in which every single global resident is a simultaneous participant.
At the same time, the media industry continues to heave in a growing tempest of new streaming TV, search, and social media that has unmoored traditional media. The scale of the pandemic will undoubtedly catalyze many of these trends, further pounding the industry with waves of change. Innovative business leaders must adapt to survive.
Here are 4 ways Covid-19 will leave a lasting mark on media and entertainment.
Opportunity in New Virtual Realities
Remember when virtual reality was the next big thing of 2014? It took a global pandemic, but our collective realities are becoming more virtual every day. We are taking part in an unprecedented global experimental in which an array of digital technology will be tested to its fullest potential.
Music was the first entertainment medium to digitize via streaming music. Now live performances have become livestreams as musicians have sought to connect with fans during the quarantine. Diplo, Miley Cyrus, Alt-J, Rae Sremmurd, Metallica, and more have all committed to upcoming digital performances. DJs like D-NICE conduct near daily livestreams on IGTV, drawing over 100,000 viewers in a single session. The digital formats, tools, and platforms tested now will lead to future innovation in an industry already accustomed to streaming music platforms like Spotify and Pandora.
The home has become the workplace. Many proponents of work from home policies now have the chance to experiment with a set of large distributed teams. The quarantines offer both businesses and employees the ability to test the efficacy of virtual meetings, project management platforms, and work travel versus virtual connection. Digital tech had already shifted more of the labor force into freelance, remote, or contract work. Smart businesses should conduct cost-benefit analyses of the new normal against their past assumptions. With mass layoffs and virtual tool improvements, expect an even larger gig economy to emerge on the other side.
In the education world, 54 million students are being sent home across the U.S. From kindergartens to universities, formal online courses are being rolled out across the country. At the same time pop-up home school applications and class work are becoming life-savers for many families with young children. Education, a $1.35 billion industry, is ripe for digital disruption.
Video games are impacting the cultural zeitgeist in ways that the movie industry wish it still could. In 2018, video game revenue eclipsed movies at $43.8 billion. Gaming is so hot that a variety of digital media platforms (Twitch, YouTube, Mixer) now actively court gaming streamers with large, exclusive contracts. Gaming offers people borderless interactivity, high engagement, and in-home entertainment, all of which are in high demand during a quarantine.
Add an emerging eSport movement and a lack of traditional sports content, and we will see massive gains by the video game industry this year. This squarely puts gaming as the best positioned entertainment medium in this environment. If you are a traditional media brand, you better get into gaming. Fast. There’s a reason Reed Hastings of Netflix said Fortnite is a bigger competitor than HBO. I’m predicting a studio and a gaming firm combine in the next two years. If Netflix buys an indie game studio like Jackbox games, someone give me a dollar.
Hollywood Goes Digital
Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Ellen and Stephen Colbert have all moved to YouTube. As the Verge astutely points out, “For years late-night shows have tried to adopt many of the successful qualities of YouTube creators. By taking to vlogging late-night hosts have a newfound charming presence they could never quite achieve on a traditional set.”
Hollywood and digital media has been slowly coalescing for a decade. David Dobrik’s YouTube channel has reinvented the reality show format on YouTube. Digital shows like Good Mythical Morning are so well produced that they’re indistinguishable from TV. Traditional celebrities like Jack Black, the Rock, and recent viral sensation Some Good News with John Kransinki have invested time and energy building digital channels. The top 10 most followed IG accounts are all celebrities, musicians, or athletes.
As Hollywood productions shutdown, more traditional celebrities (artists, actors, athletes) will embrace digital platforms to cultivate and maintain their fanbase. On the flip side, digital will be the future breeding grounds for Hollywood’s next generation of talent. Forward thinking studios like Netflix have already embraced digital celebrities. To All the Boys I loved Before, a hugely popular romantic comedy, was produced by AwesomenessTV, originally a digital creator studio.
Almost to the day last year, I predicted all media will be digital. Coronavirus has moved the digital community squarely into the spotlight, and it won’t ever go away. Cross-pollination will increase as digital creator and celebrity become one in same and the exchange of formats, ideas, and talent increases.
Coronavirus Kills the Movie Theater
The movie theater business will be one biggest victims of Coronavirus. Box office revenues in 2020 fell to a decades low two weeks ago. That was before they were shut entirely. With razor thin margins and a decades long bleeding of movie goers, Covid-19 will shutter thousands of theaters across the globe.
Guaranteed theatrical windows, or the time between entertainment IP’s release and its home entertainment debut, ensured theaters had an exclusive time frame to profit from films released. Even prior to the Covid-19 crisis, there had been substantial pressure from streaming TV, movie studios, and tech firms.
Netflix and Amazon Prime have been shunning theaters, opting to instead release their movies direct to consumers through their platforms. Disney, the last big franchise film studio and 80% of 2019’s box office, has squeezed theatrical margins by demanding a larger percentage of box office receipts. YouTube, gaming, and social media has taken considerable overall consumer media timeshare.
With theaters shuttered across the country, entertainment firms have bypassed theaters completely, releasing their entire slate of movies direct to consumer. Amazon built a home theater offering. Universal is making their movies available to rent across Comcast, Sky, Apple, and Amazon. Disney will release their Spring and early Summer movies on their proprietary platform, Disney+.
Smaller theater chains will go under while larger ones, like AMC and Cinemark, will be forced to downsize and sell assets to Wallstreet. If the theatrical window returns at all, it will be a shadow of its former self. This has major implications for independent films which will have to find new ways to get seen.
However, there are some bright spots for the indie world. New startups like Film Hub and Filmocracy have risen to fill the theatrical decline. Meanwhile, theaters will have to become something else entirely to survive. Expect to see new installations- like immersive VR, event spaces, and bar/restaurant complexes that will attract more crowds - replace the movie theater as we know it.
Distributed Production
Shows that can be filmed, organized, produced, and delivered digitally will be better equipped to weather the storm. Many of these novel formats will stick as they prove more cost effective for networks in the long run.
Look for more shows to utilize licensed clips, animation, reaction content, and virtual interviews. There’s a lot of ingredients that go into a final piece of media, but many formats do not need to be shot live on location. Google Android’s 2015 Be Together campaign from Droga 5 is a perfect example of an ad cobbled together from third party sources.
Tools that support remote collaboration like Adobe creative suite, project management software, and cloud-based storage will thrive. CGI have gotten so good that it can stand on its own as a finished product. Capture audio, add sound effects, supervise music, outsource your scenes to VFX departments and one could theoretically produce Toy Story 5 (or any number of Pixar or animated movies) completely remotely.
Producers are notoriously scrappy, and the prospect of disparate teams producing content is becoming more the norm than the exception. Couple distributed production with a new wave of creator talent, the death of the movie theater, and a slew of new virtual products, and I foresee further tectonic movement underneath the media ecosystem.
We’ll survive Covid-19. The old media world won’t.
