The two speakers at this keynote about the “Future of Content”at SXSW 2022 were:
My main notes from the keynote:
Media companies still are much smaller than Tech companies. Tech companies are competing with Media company for the same thing: your Attention.
Amazon is growing very fast in Digital Advertisement and getting close to Google and Meta. But soon Tik Tok will become a success: social commerce trend, started in Asia but tik tok is going to lead the way there globally.
Pretty big cloud hanging over these players: REGULATION. now focused mainly on social media (misinformation, data privacy, etc). But soon ANTITRUST is going to be another big issue for Tech companies.
There has been a lot of M&A: AT&T and Warner media, Disney and Fox, Amazon and MGM, etc: some of these companies need to be bought to survive.
Also, more and more celebrities investing into Media deals, such as Reese Whiterspoon and Lebron James media companies being acquired.
There’s a boom in content creation spending; for instance Disney invested 40 billions, but Netflix is the one that invests the most (around 20 b)
How can these companies grow? New geographies, new markets (ex. Netflix entering into gaming), ads (ex Disney entering ads).
Streaming vs TV: in 2021 there was more content produced for Streaming than for Tv, and cable TV is losing its customer base.
What is still working for Cable TV? SPORTS
Also News is a category that is still working for TV Cable:
Streaming audio business is booming: radio is dropping, but there’s a strong transition to streaming: YouTube still bigger platform for Podcasting, Spotify is 2nd.
Podcasting also makes more money to Podcasting platforms as Spotify than streaming music.
Creators economy/ influencers: 2/5th of overall consumed conrenti is User Generated Content, created by creators. Also more profitable (they have low costs of production) and target a much younger audience.
Esports: it’s about 1 billion dollar business, not super big yet but growing. Main player is Twitch (Amazon) but they’re getting more competition from YouTube Gaming and Facebook.
Overall, there has been much M&A in gaming:
Metaverse: too early to understand the impact on media, now the big focus is on NFTs (collectibles). Now the activity is on Fortnight, Roblox where there’s a young gamers audience. But Mark Zuckerberg does not believe so: he believes it will be massive and will focus on Hardware.
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