Playing by new rules: Media and Entertainment Industry trends 2020

2020 saw demand patterns shift as consumers actively sought alternatives and had the time to try new things. Aided by the growth of digital infrastructure, digital media adoption accelerated. Consequently, consumption patterns shifted and increased across online news, gaming and entertainment.

Key trends in Media and Entertainment Industry in 2020

While M&E as a sector has usually grown and often outperformed India’s nominal GDP, the sector fell three times (3x) India’s nominal GDP fall of 8% due to the discretionary nature of the spend. Subscription revenues however proved their mettle by holding up better than advertising revenues.

Online gaming: Continuing as the fastest growing segment of the M&E sector for the fourth year in a row, the segment grew 18% helped by work from home, school from home and increased trial of online multi-player games during the lockdown.

Digital advertising: Digital advertising stayed stable, led by increased allocation from traditional advertisers who accelerated their investments in digital sales channels.

Digital subscription: 28 million Indians (up from 10.5 million in 2019) paid for 53 million OTT subscriptions in 2020 leading to a 49% growth in digital subscription revenues.

Animation and VFX Stoppage of television and film content production for several months in 2020 resulted in a fall in revenues

Live events: Perhaps the hardest hit of all, the segment witnessed numerous attempts to digitalize its offerings, but could only recover a small fraction of revenues through that medium.

Filmed entertainment: While theatrical revenues plummeted to less than a quarter of their 2019 levels, a portion of this loss was made up through higher digital rights revenues which almost doubled during 2020 to INR35 billion.

Music: The digitization of music continued in 2020 with audio streaming revenues growing 15% but overall, music segment revenues were flat as performance rights fell by over 65%

Television: The largest segment saw a 22% fall in advertising revenues on account of highly discounted ad rates during the lockdown months – though ad volumes reduced only 3%.

OOH: The segment lost out due to reduced travel and less time spent out of the home on account of the lockdown.

Print: Print’s revenue declines were led by a 41% fall in advertising and a 24% fall in circulation revenues.

Radio: Radio revenues, which had fallen 7.5% in 2019, fell by over 50% again on account of both ad rate and volume drops as key advertiser segments (regional and retail) were unable to run their businesses at their usual scale.