Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll's famous "Alice in Wonderland" metaphor of "Through the Looking Glass" describes a world that looks recognizable but unfamiliar. A fitting description for the Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry in 2022.

The year began with the hope that life and the economy would return to pre-COVID "normal," but it did not happen. With much of the planet still impacted by COVID and a global recession, M&E markets tried to make sense of it and respond accordingly. Just as Alice found Wonderland, a world turned upside down, that's how we find the world of M&E at the end of 2022.



In December 2022, we predicted three things would occur in M&E:

1.     The battle for audience share would intensify

2.     Investment in original foreign-language content would increase

3.     Culturalization would become an integral component of localization

Let’s see how close we came to predicting life in Wonderland in 2022.

Audience Share

Despite a global recession and a Q2 decline in Netflix subscription numbers, consumers continue to move from linear TV to the alphabet of Video on Demand (VOD) services in increasing quantities. For the first time, streaming overtook cable in total viewership in July with a 34.8% share of the audience compared to 34.4% for cable and 21.6% for broadcast TV. Across the board, subscriptions increased for streaming services and gaming platforms, while satellite and cable companies continued to experience six-figure declines. Streaming platforms also saw significant subscriber growth in Asia and Pacific (APAC) markets.

Accompanying this growth are industry churn rates for subscription platforms that have increased year-over-year by 5.3%. The reason for that is, according to Evan Shapiro, "Users are signing up for hit shows, bingeing them, and then canceling in favor of another service with a different hit show."

The lesson for M&E is, "keep the hits coming." Answering the question of where those hits come from leads us to our second prediction.

Foreign Content Spend Increased

Driven by increases in international subscribers, total investment in non-U.S. content increased to $115B in 2022, while total spending increased to $232B. Netflix, for example, committed $45M to develop French and European content over the next three years. Paramount+ expanded into 45 new foreign markets, which means like other VOD companies, they must comply with EU content origin requirements. Even as the global economy slows, analysts expect global content spending to increase industry-wide by an average of 10% in 2023, with a focus on quality and cost.

Culturalization Became Important

Along with the recognition that titles bought for single-language markets may find audiences globally came the realization that localization and culturalization matter. We refer to this as the "Squid Game Effect." Although wildly successful, "Squid Game" suffered from sometimes brutal social and news media reports that the show suffered from inaccurate or misleading subs, dubs, and closed captioning. While these reports didn't seem to affect the series' audience, they left many wondering if the story they saw was the one intended. The reaction's effect on writers, directors, and producers was to make them more aware of the need for cultural and linguistic accuracy.

Localization firms have responded to these critiques and challenges, but so have the people doing the work. While there is some fundamental disagreement about how to improve the process, the underlying reality is that the industry accepts that culture matters to audiences — a lot.

What about next year?

Predictions are fun to make and revisit at the end of the year to see how well you guessed what might happen. Our 2022 predictions were pretty accurate, but they weren't lucky guesses. As Hall of Fame baseball player, Yogi Berra famously said, “You can observe a lot by just watching."

What we predicted for 2022 was inevitable because of how audiences, content, and regulation have evolved. The trends driving that evolution are still in play and will continue to impact the industry, not just next year but for years to come.

We will explore the evolution and impacts when we debut our 2023 predictions next week.  The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.