Marcus Richards
The way we receive our entertainment has been changing for some years now, and this seems set to continue. One of the key pieces of news in the last few months came from TikTok, who are now allowing their users to create longer videos of up to ten minutes. How could this change the way we watch social videos and what other changes can we expect in the entertainment industry in the near future?
The Impact of More Social Video Creation
When it was launched, TikTok allowed users to record and share videos of just 15 seconds. This length has been increased a couple of times before the most recent change, but the relative shortness of the videos meant that it was difficult for users to monetize their content. However, even with the shorter videos the platform has been growing massively. An increase in revenue of over 140%, to a new high of $4.6 billion, in 2021 reflected the fact that the number of active monthly users had reached 1.3 billion by the end of the year. It remains to be seen whether the longer video duration allows the platform to continue its spectacular growth.
This isn’t the only platform based on the creation of social videos. YouTube has been around since 2005 and the most-watched video has had 10 billion views. Facebook also provides the potential for users to create social videos, with the autoplay feature making it more attention-grabbing than posts with images. These videos are often used by businesses to educate and inspire their customers, and research carried out by Hootsuite suggests that spending on ads in social media videos will increase by over 20%, to more than $24 billion, in 2022.
As more people opt for watching social videos, we can expect to see the importance of this market grow. Marketing teams are going to dedicate more of their budgets to advertising on social media videos, with all of the big social media platforms introducing videos in one way or another. Not all of the new ideas work, as we can tell from the example of Fleets from Twitter. This was introduced at the end of 2020 to give users a new way of publishing a video that expired after a day. However, the option was removed after a few months, as Twitter bosses discovered that Fleets didn’t attract more people to conversations in the way they hoped.
The Continued Growth of Streaming
Streaming has been in the news a lot in the last couple of years, but this technology isn’t just limited to platforms that let us watch movies and TV shows on demand. We can also see streaming in the video gaming industry, where Twitch grew from 3.9 million monthly active streamers in 2019 to over nine million a year later. The site now has around 15 million daily active users. Facebook Gaming, VK.com and YouTube Gaming are some of the other big names in the gaming market.
We can also see streaming used in casino games like roulette on the Betway site. The Real Roulette title comes in various versions, with different human dealers on each of them, while themed alternatives include Real Spooky Roulette and Real Christmas Roulette. This technology, which is built into some modern TVs, is also used at their blackjack tables, where the players can watch live as each new card is placed on the table, and we can expect to see more streamed games with live dealers in the future.
In the same way, live streaming has emerged as an option in industries as diverse as eCommerce, music and eSports tournaments. The introduction of additional network bandwidth for many internet users and easy access to professional broadcasting equipment has helped to fuel this trend. This is something we can expect to see expand into different areas, as we increasingly see logging into a live stream on mobile devices as part of our normal daily routine. Businesses are also starting to use live streaming applications as a way of hooking up with customers to troubleshoot problems and provide a more comprehensive service.
The Way Podcasts Have Gone Mainstream
The rise of podcasting gives us a great example of the trend for going directly to our favourite creators for regular new content. Podcasts have arguably already gone mainstream and their impressive growth is expected to continue in 2022. This list of the most popular podcasts has The Joe Rogan Experience in the top spot, with around 11 million listeners making this podcast the top performer in Spotify in 2021.
Overall, it’s thought that in the US alone some 140 million people will tune in to their favourite podcasts one or more times each month in 2022. Other studies suggest that there are more than two million podcasts and that 7% of us listen to one daily, with men being keener podcast listeners than women. As the number of podcasts grows and their diversity broadens, we can expect to see the cost of placing adverts in them grow, as this way of getting entertained and informed becomes a bigger part of our lives.
We’ve already seen podcasts become more professional and slick in recent times, and this is sure to be a future trend as audiences increase further. Expect to see podcasts appearing on every sort of subject and on more platforms. Podcasts have actually been around since the 1980s, but our current ability to listen to them on mobile devices anywhere and at any time has helped to push them up to new levels of popularity.
These are some of the major areas of growth in the entertainment industry, where we can see new technology used to provide the kind of experience that the public wants. More changes should occur as we adapt to these relatively new ways of enjoying some of our favourite past-times.
