According to Maeil Business, PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2026–2030 sees the industry’s visual grammar changing: streaming is no longer framed chiefly as a race for subscriber totals, but as a contest over advertising, data-led monetisation and the ability to turn audiences into enduring communities. For film and television viewers, this matters because the service in front of us is being recut into something broader than a library of titles. The next battleground is not simply what we watch, but how platforms pay for the right to keep showing it to us.
Advertising enters the frame
PwC expects the global entertainment and media market to grow at an average annual rate of 3.4% through 2030, reaching $4.2 trillion. Advertising is positioned as the principal engine of that growth, with the sector expected to exceed $1.4 trillion.
That forecast helps explain the industry’s altered pacing. Subscription fatigue has put limits on an expansion model built around accumulating members at any cost; the report expects the global online video market to reach about $304 billion by 2030, while major platforms broaden advertising-supported price tiers and live-sports offerings. The familiar streaming menu is therefore likely to become a more intricate piece of commercial architecture: a place where films, drama, sport, music, games and user-generated material occupy the same ecosystem.
For viewers, the practical question is less romantic but increasingly unavoidable: what kind of viewing experience comes with a lower-priced plan, and what data exchange sits behind it? Personalisation, AI-based audience analysis and advertising-performance measurement are all identified as supports for growth. We should not mistake the convenience of a recommendation for a neutral editorial gesture; it is also part of a system seeking to understand what holds our attention.
The return of shared reality
The report’s most revealing phrase may be its insistence that, despite AI and digital technology reshaping how content is made, distributed and consumed, the industry’s essence remains in “human experience.” PwC identifies shared experiences—sports, concerts and exhibitions among them—as a key growth driver, while demand for offline experiential content rises.
Cinema has always understood this tension. A screen can be endlessly portable, but the charge of a collective response cannot be perfectly replicated by a personalised feed. Live broadcasts and event programming are not merely additional categories for streamers; they are attempts to reclaim the immediacy of an audience breathing, laughing or falling silent together. In that sense, the current competition is also a competition over presence.
The business logic has a parallel elsewhere in digital markets, where services expand beyond a single function into larger ecosystems—much as crypto exchanges are evolving into full-service investment platforms. Entertainment’s version is more culturally delicate: the risk is that every form of attention becomes interchangeable inventory, even when the work itself demands time, patience and a particular kind of spectatorship.
IP, data and the difficult value of distinction
PwC’s conclusion, as cited by Maeil Business, is stark: competitiveness will depend on securing data, AI capability and differentiated intellectual property, then connecting them to new revenue and customer experiences. That formulation contains both the opportunity and the artistic pressure point.
Data may clarify who is watching, and advertising can subsidise access, but neither automatically produces the distinctive image, rhythm or thematic resonance that makes a film or series linger after the app closes. As platforms consolidate their ambitions across formats, differentiated IP risks becoming a financial phrase detached from authorship. Yet it can also be a reminder that a recognisable creative identity has value precisely because it cannot be generated by market scale alone.
What we should watch now is the balance between those impulses. The services that matter most will not merely assemble more content or more ways to sell against it. They will have to prove that commercial breadth can still leave room for work with a point of view—and for audiences who want more than an endlessly optimised next selection.