“IoT is instrumental to future expansion of media industry”

By Amit Joshi

The COVID pandemic has forced the media and entertainment (M&E) business across markets to accelerate some of the transformational changes they had already been initiated. The industry has had to relook at some of its customer engagement models with the emergence of a new demand side. This is born from the new reality of understanding the importance of consumer behavior and to better engage with them.

The diverse nature of India’s consumer base, coupled with the demand for hyper-personalization, continue to fuel the growth of traditional media. This is accompanied by new opportunities for M&E businesses.

New distribution models and monetization strategies are evolving across both large and small screens. Learning content through mobile and gaming has emerged as big new opportunities. These changes are driving a shift in monetisation of content, leading to organizations experimenting with several models.

With growth of IoT, content providers can deliver and monetize the content on multiple new devices, and create engaging experiences adapted to IoT platforms.

The future of the M&E industry in India continues to gravitate towards digital advances for entertainment, news, and business, which translates to major opportunities for all players in the value chain.

Technologies driving M&E

The combination of the internet of things (IoT), blockchain, and artificial intelligence (AI) presents a tremendous potential to improve efficiency and drive new opportunities across media and entertainment businesses, right from creation.

With the growth of IoT, content providers can deliver and monetize their content on a multitude of new devices, and create engaging experiences adapted to IoT platforms. The rise of IoT helps organizations track a variety of physical parameters including a user’s location, movement, and interests, thereby helping M&E companies enhance their understanding of customers and potentially point the direction in which they can drive ad revenues by delivering personalized content.

Concerns and way forward

The future and success of M&E companies largely depend on their ability to capitalize on the data at their disposal to create personalized content, advertisements, and offers for customers. They must figure out how to identify a business and the operating model that balances the development of IoT and management costs with the incremental revenue per user and investment returns. One of the biggest challenges for deploying IoT in M&E is the issue of companies not being able to scale up their digital transformation initiatives in a cost-effective manner.

As the choice of video, audio and textual products keep growing with the advent of newer players and products, the need to differentiate product design and the customer experience (CX) becomes more important. Integrating sustainable and genuine experiential aspects such as interactivity, AR, and VR can help differentiate the product and build a loyal fan base.

Building a plug-and-play interactivity stack, which is easily deployable across channels, content genres and media, can bring increased engagement for audiences.

Building a plug-and-play interactivity stack, which is easily deployable across channels, content genres, and media, can bring increased engagement for audiences and add to the time spent.

Acquiring skillsets for the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be a necessity. The revolution around IoT and personal consumption will trigger a massive opportunity for automated decision making, across all customer touchpoints. Knowledge of wearables, interactivity, AI, machine learning (ML), social media, and location-based services will become essential for M&E industry leaders.

The plethora of regulations around data privacy, complaints management, content, advertising, data storage, age limits, and access to adult content can be daunting when dealing with millions of customers. Automating these aspects will be critical to scaling efficiently while still complying with regulations.

IoT is instrumental to the future expansion of the media industry. This is because IoT allows M&E organizations to predict and understand consumer behavior. Using this information, media companies can understand the emerging needs of customers they are targeting and tailor their ads for them.

As M&E solutions become high on digital, devices can read and understand consumers in real-time. This presents several interesting benefits that can propel M&E companies towards better business opportunities.

The future outlook

Given the growing consolidation in the M&E industry, it will likely lead to the emergence of a limited set of players that could dominate large chunks of the TV and video market. These players will have local and global content partnerships, underpinned by an all-IP device ecosystem. The shift to all-IP will also help in providing a much more enhanced experience to consumers, including custom recommendations and targeted advertising.

Large content owners have the upper hand in the present and upcoming scenario. They have started vertical integration by directly distributing content to the consumers, bypassing platform players. Content is a key differentiator in the video market. Large production houses will be serving global markets and gain from economies of scale, while smaller production houses may find it hard to survive the competition. Content owners will begin to directly negotiate with advertisers, and a global advertising business model is set to evolve.

The combination of IoT, blockchain and AI presents a huge potential to improve efficiency and drive new opportunities across media and entertainment businesses.

A key defining aspect of the future is everyone doing everything. The rich content will serve the consumer through a variety of digital platform players. Media houses will look to have a strategic partnership with digital platform players, broadcasters, and telecommunication companies that have established their networks for seamless content aggregation and distribution to the consumer. Advertising agencies will become more crucial and relevant in this complex ecosystem.

Joshi is Director at Capgemini Invent India