DPP: “Media industry determined to reset”
February 7, 2022
The DPP, the media industry’s business network, has published its annual predictions report. In its sixth year and enabled by DPP member company Zixi, the DPP 2022 Predictions were drawn up by 31 senior leaders from across the DPP membership. They paint a picture of an industry determined to grow and adapt to rapid change and colossal demand for content. But it is also a picture of anxiety and instability due to turbulent economic conditions.
“What is striking about the unprecedented impact of the pandemic, is that the change vectors are heading in so many different directions,” says DPP CEO Mark Harrison, the report author. “The very definition of the media industry is being stretched and remoulded in a way that offers enormous opportunity – but also unprecedented risk. There is no roadmap.”
This year the DPP’s group of experts came up with eight predictions and considered the overall Mood Music for the year ahead – the prevailing conditions that will surround almost everything a media company does.
Sustainability returned as a specific Mood Music theme in its own right, having been superseded by Values in 2021. The experts also named Growth, Adaptability and Actionable insight in the 2022 Mood Music, along with Culture which the group felt best captured nuances around workforce, diversity and inclusivity – both internally and externally.
Ranking their 2022 predictions by order of impact, DPP members decided these were the top four:
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The purpose of the workplace will be redefined – a 2021 prediction the group felt had not been fulfilled.
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Virtual production will enter the mainstream, with the use of augmented reality in live production and content capture moving beyond innovation to widespread adoption.
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Media organisations will design for cross-functional agility, bringing together multidisciplinary teams to react to the next content or consumer trend.
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This will be the year of linear OTT, emerging as a solution to tackle the staggering proliferation of content.
Zixi CEO Gordon Brooks, one of the participants in the discussion, commented on the fourth prediction, “There’s a huge demand to bundle into linear channels vast amounts of content in different languages based on ethnicity in different parts of the country, and different parts of the world. So it’s content everywhere, much more than we’ve ever seen before. If you look at last year, it just really sped up and there is a massive amount of channels being exchanged, and now being packaged to monetize in many different ways.”