PwC: Digital innovation drives demand for human experiences

• PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook forecasts that spending in the vast industry will rise at a 3.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, when total revenues will reach $4.2 trillion.  
• In an age of digital innovation, live and immersive experiences, including sports, concerts, and trade shows, will show significant growth as consumers seek in-person experiences.  
• Advertising, enabled by AI, will grow rapidly, topping $1.4 trillion by 2030, as marketers seek to meet consumers where they are accessing content and making retail decisions. 

The global entertainment and media (E&M) industry grew 5.3% in 2025, with total revenue from advertising, connectivity, and consumer spending reaching US$3.5 trillion, and it should rise another 4.6% in 2026. The industry remains on a firm growth trajectory. According to PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2026–30, which charts growth in 12 segments across 53 territories (see Methodology for more information on the segments), the global E&M market will grow at a CAGR of 3.4% for the next five years, reaching $4.2 trillion in 2030. This expansion, unlocking $600 billion in new revenues in 2030, will be overwhelmingly driven by digital ecosystems across the E&M landscape. 

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Players in the E&M ecosystem who want to capture their share of those new revenues—and then turn those revenues into profit—will have to act quickly. Innovation has forged change in the creative industries, and it will continue to do so. Increasingly powerful digital technologies centred on AI will disrupt and change the way E&M products and services are created, distributed, and monetised. These shifts will alter profit pools along the value chain, open the door for new business models, and transform consumer expectations.  

But AI won’t change what people expect and need from entertainment and media. No matter how digital and algorithmic the user experience becomes, at its root, E&M remains an industry built on human craft and human experiences. Expertise, judgement, creativity, nuance, emotions, needs, relationships: these fundamentally human attributes drive engagement, interest, and passion. Going forward, technology, and especially AI, will enable more effective and efficient means of connecting people to one another, and connecting marketers to consumers. The most rapidly growing of the big three E&M sectors—advertising—is geared towards reaching individuals wherever they experience and interact with content, and precisely when and where they choose to make purchasing decisions. 

Among the clear findings in our forecast: 

• Consumers in 2030 will want choice, low prices, and digital access—even if their willingness to pay for these things remains limited. 
• In a digital world, people will be increasingly attracted to real-world experiences that are immersive, emotional, contextual, and personal. 
• Advertisers will keep spending more to meet customers where they want to be. Advertising surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, and it will rise to $1.4 trillion in 2030.  

Sphere, a massive, immersive concert and media venue in Las Vegas, has proven to be a powerful attraction. In 2025, it reported revenues of $781 million, with programming including 4D screenings of The Wizard of Oz and Eagles concerts. Its parent company is now planning expansion elsewhere in the US and in Dubai. 

Small screens may dominate people’s personal and professional lives. But through 2030, we will continue to see growth in content experiences centred on one-time events and activities taking place in public, in real life, and in real time—at Sphere, Cosm, and other ‘shared reality’ venues. Live, immersive shared reality experiences are becoming increasingly valuable because they function as social currency: proof points that can be broadcast across social media to project status, taste, and cultural relevance to the younger consumers who place high values on these experiences.  

Several of the segments that will chart growth in the coming five years fall under the broad live-and-in-person umbrella. These include movie box office, live music, and the rapidly growing gambling segment, which centres around live sports and other events. Other areas that depend on in-person, out-of-home (OOH) experiences, like B2B trade shows and B2C OOH advertising, are making up a larger piece of the E&M pie as well.  

The streamers’ challenge 

Sports are one piece of the puzzle for streamers as they look to the future. Total over-the-top (OTT) revenues—including consumer spending on video, advertising spending, and TV delivered only by traditional broadcasters—rose an impressive 13.9% in 2025 to $226.6 billion from $199 billion in 2024. But the pace of this growth will slow. In maturing streaming markets such as Australia, Spain, and South Korea, consumers are beginning to exhibit ‘subscription fatigue.’ The industry may be confronting the limits of consumers’ willingness to pay for multiple subscriptions. Through 2030, OTT revenues will grow at a CAGR of 6.1% to reach $304 billion. That represents $77.4 billion in new revenues over 2025. One notable trend is that as consumers resist paying for continually rising numbers of subscriptions, advertising will assume a more prominent role. OTT ads, now 19.4% of revenues, will grow at a 9.4% CAGR so that in 2030 they will represent 22.6% of revenues. 

The forces at work in the streaming economy will push greater consolidation and bigger bundles of content and services. In 2030, as streamers strive to drive higher per-user revenue growth and minimise churn, their offerings will look different than they do today. Big streaming platforms will strive to be the entertainment hub of the home, offering access to television, movies, video games, music, sports, social media, and user-generated content. In other words, they will offer bigger bundles of content. 

The opposing forces of platform centralisation and content decentralisation will continue to shape the media and entertainment industry, as they have since the birth of the World Wide Web.  

On the one hand, we expect growing concentration of advertising revenues among a handful of huge global players and more M&A megadeals as streamers seek scale. These companies, and the advertisers they sell to, want to aggregate the largest possible collections of users. Yet these platforms increasingly rely on the human spark of creativity among millions of creators, influencers, and streamers who are building their own audiences on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and TikTok.  

Through 2030, audiences will increasingly discover content through feeds rather than schedules, creators rather than commissioners, and recommendation systems rather than editorial curation. As smartphones, platform tools, AI, and low-cost production reduce barriers to entry, livestreaming and short-form user-generated content (UGC) videos will shift media further away from centrally controlled distribution and towards a more democratised environment. China and India present interesting case studies in decentralisation in the OTT/streaming space. After a decade of rapid OTT expansion led by major domestic platforms like Youku, iQIYI, and Tencent Video, China’s competitive landscape is fragmenting, with smaller and more specialised services gaining traction, particularly short-form video ecosystems such as Douyin and Kuaishou. In India, competition is dominated by domestic platforms—notably JioHotstar and Sun NXT—focused on local language content, Bollywood catalogues, and cricket rights.  

Centralisation in new ecosystems 

Countervailing forces are pushing the E&M industry towards increasing centralisation and the creation of new bundles in several dimensions. Connectivity, including what people pay for internet access, is the largest of the three major E&M sectors (advertising, connectivity, and consumer spending). Thanks in part to the growth of social platforms and decentralised content creation, revenue growth in connectivity, the largest E&M sector, will slow through 2030. Annual global service revenue for providing internet access will increase steadily at a 2.3% CAGR from $1.3 trillion in 2025 to $1.5 trillion in 2030. Wider adoption and usage of fixed and mobile broadband will account for the bulk of this growth, as paid voice services are further commoditised by cheap or free IP-based alternatives and the prevalence of messaging apps. (PwC’s Global Telecom Outlook goes into more depth on how muted growth will influence business strategy.) Meanwhile, global traditional TV revenues fell 2.7% in 2025 to $360.5 billion and will continue to fall at a CAGR of –01.1% to $341.2 billion by 2030.  

In response, traditional TV and telecom operators are going back to the future. Bundling, the business concept that underlies the declining cable industry, now has renewed currency. Companies such as Sky, Comcast, Rogers, and Jio are combining pay TV, broadband, and third-party streaming subscriptions within single offers. Bundling can help operators reduce churn and retain relevance even as audiences continue to shift away from linear viewing. Distributors including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube TV are offering bundled third-party streaming subscriptions. Increasingly sophisticated bundling and aggregation models, such as Disney+ offering bundled subscription plans with Hulu and Max, seek to embed streaming services more deeply into consumption habits.  

OTT’s encroachment into key content genres like live events has spurred the traditional media industry to move away from direct competition and into collaborative partnerships. In the UK, the BBC’s agreement in 2026 to produce YouTube-specific content under a partnership with the streaming giant reflected a recognition by traditional broadcasters that younger audiences are now more readily reached on third-party platforms than through their own video on demand (VOD) services. In France, TF1’s agreement with Netflix shows how incumbent broadcasters are using global streaming platforms to monetise content libraries—bringing the traditional partner a bigger audience reach while providing the global platform with high-quality local content.  

Centralisation through consolidation 

The current M&A cycle differs from prior waves. Not only are audiences fragmenting, but legacy profit pools are increasingly dependent on companies’ bargaining power over distribution and access to advertising. Large companies with significant investments in existing systems, including advertising, cable, and streaming, must position themselves for a future of comparatively slower growth. The Omnicom–IPG merger in 2025 created the world’s largest advertising agency holding group. Canal+, seeking to gain exposure to rapidly growing markets, in 2025 completed the acquisition of MultiChoice, the video provider in South Africa. Paramount was acquired by Skydance, and then merged with Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a significantly larger streaming, production, and distribution platform. In the OOH segment, as companies are eager to reach people closer to the point of economic decision-making, a number of transformative corporate restructuring moves have consolidated inventory and technological capabilities into fewer, more powerful entities. In 2025, T-Mobile bought programmatic DOOH platform Vistar Media, and Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO) sold its units in Northern Europe to Bauer Media Group and in Brazil to an affiliate of Eletromidia, in order to focus on its core US and airports businesses.  

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