Pulling the future forward

The entertainment and media industry reconfigures amid recovery

NEW YORK, Sept. 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Consumer habits can take a lifetime to learn – but just a lockdown to lose. According to PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2020–2024, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and amplified ongoing shifts in consumers' behaviour, pulling forward digital disruption and forging industry tipping points that wouldn't have been reached for many years. Digitalisation, one of the major forces shaping all industries, has been intensified by social distancing and mobility restrictions. As a result, the entertainment and media (E&M) world in 2020 has become more remote, more virtual, more streamed, more personal and – for now at least – more centred on the home than anyone anticipated at the start of the year.

Industry growth contracts sharply…

The pandemic afflicting the world brought the global E&M industry's growth to a shuddering halt. As a result, we delayed publication of the Outlook by three months so we could properly assess the pandemic's impacts. The revised projections for revenue growth underline why this was the right decision. Amid a global recession, 2020 will see the sharpest fall in global E&M revenue in the 21-year history of this research, with a decline of 5.6% from 2019 – more than US$120bn in absolute terms. In 2009, the last year the global economy shrank, total global E&M spending fell by just 3.0%.

…but remains robust in the longer term  

However, while the shockwaves from 2020 will continue to ripple through the global economy, our forecast shows the industry's fundamental growth trajectory remains strong. In recent years, as media experiences have become ever more central to our lives, global E&M growth has typically outpaced GDP. Just so, after the challenges of 2020, we expect E&M to reassume its outperformance. 

Our projections show that in 2021, E&M spending will grow by 6.4%. Looking across the five-year forecast period, from 2019 to 2024, we're forecasting overall revenue growth running at a 2.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Tipping point timelines accelerate

As is the case in the economy at large, the current pain in E&M is not evenly shared around the industry. It's most acute in segments that COVID-19 literally shut down, such as events: live music, cinema and trade shows. Spending on advertising likewise will fall by 13.4%. At the same time, the long-running transition in newspapers from print to digital has been fast-forwarded several years, cutting into papers' print revenues, for example.