According to PwC’s latest Global Entertainment & Media Outlook, M&E revenues are expected to hit $3.5 trillion by 2029, led by advertising, live events and video games. The report also offers a positive outlook for streaming video, OTT, subscription VOD, theatrical box office, with numerous M&E areas impacted by the adoption of artificial intelligence. Streaming video is expected to jump 33 percent to more than $112 billion by 2029, while global revenue for video games is forecast to reach $300 billion in 2029, up 29 percent from $224 billion in 2024. Of three major categories analyzed — connectivity, advertising and consumer — advertising is expected to grow the fastest.

PwC anticipates 6.1 percent CAGR for advertising compared to 2 percent for consumer. Connectivity is the largest sector, with spending projected at $1.3 trillion in 2029 (+2.8 percent CAGR), “driven mainly by mobile Internet service.”

Advertising is becoming the strongest form of direct revenue “and the powerhouse of the sector’s global growth,” finds PwC, contextualizing that “global advertising and consumer revenue were more or less at parity in 2023,” but by 2029, advertising is forecast to be +$300 billion over consumer spending.

Among the findings:

• Digital media accounted for 72 percent of ad spending in 2024 and is projected at 80.4 percent in 2029.
• Over-the-top (OTT) video revenue is expected to grow from $169 billion in 2024 to $230 billion in 2029, while ad-based video on demand (AVOD), 20 percent of category revenue in 2020, will swell to 27.1 percent in 2029.
• Ad dollars are increasingly migrating to e-commerce platforms — which are being more aggressively marketed to advertisers in attempt to retain margin “as it becomes more difficult to raise prices for consumers.”
• Amazon in 2024 saw ad revenue exceed $50 billion for the first time, while Walmart saw retail media ad revenue surpass $4 billion.

Competition, “paired with economic uncertainty and rising costs, is seeing consumer spend growth stagnate,” Wilson Chow, PwC China global technology, media and telecommunications leader, explained in a news release for the study.

Interestingly, non-digital spending dominates the consumer sector throughout the forecast period, with a 60 percent share in 2025, projected to shrink to 56 percent in 2029. Live concerts and sporting events account for a large swathe of those expenditures.

Moviegoing also falls into the non-digital category. “Global cinema box office spending is expected to rise from $33 billion in 2024 to $41.5 billion in 2029,” writes TV Technology, noting that “consumers’ preferences are continuing to shift toward locally produced films.” Worldwide, the market share of the top five U.S. studios “dropped from over 60 percent before the pandemic to 51 percent in 2024,” PwC points out.

Artificial intelligence is having financial impact mainly in anticipated revenue to advertising channels through “hyper-personalization,” which will help drive connected TV ad revenue to o $51 billion in 2029, “equal to 45 percent of traditional broadcast TV advertising,” the report says. AI is also expected to impact entertainment production across games, films and TV.

Among consumer categories, streaming video is going strong and “poised for healthy growth over the next five years,” writes Variety, noting that “the U.S. remains the ‘largest and most influential’ streaming video market globally, generating $61.9 billion in transactional and subscription VOD revenue in 2024,” dwarfing the next-largest market, China ($10.8 billion in 2024, less than one-fifth of the size of the U.S. market).

The U.S. segment of OTT “will reach $112.7 billion in revenue by 2029, up from $84.7 billion in 2024,” with growth “driven by subscriber increases, new service launches and higher prices,” reports The Desk.