Mobile apps have revitalized how we used to get entertained and how entertainment houses interacted with their viewers. Mobile applications had come a long way since their inception 40 years ago.
Today, they have grown more than a novelty and are being used to carry out essential services and day-to-day needs. With the number of internet users bumping into 4.57 billion, mobile applications’ overall impact and scope have reached unprecedented heights and will continue to do so.
The rate at which businesses adopt mobile app technology is also a testament to their universal application and acceptance. In the year 2020 alone, more than 800,000 applications were launched on Google Play Store by more than 150,000 app developers worldwide.
On closely observing the recent media and entertainment industry trends, it can be seen that mobile applications have made interesting progress in the media and entertainment industry in little time. Being an individual’s device, mobiles have enabled users to access whatever they like without sharing it with others.
From the drawing-room TV to your palm-screen, mobile applications are responsible for transforming how we used to get entertained. This article will discuss a few entertainment and media industry benefits that have changed the entertainment landscape in just a few years.
But first, let us see some advantages of mobile apps over previously popular channels of entertainment.
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Advantages of Mobile Application in Entertainment and Media industries.
- Higher visibility: Smartphones are the most common devices today, with better reach than any other device in the world. With higher connectivity and smaller footprints, mobile applications can push a product’s visibility to the next level.
- Better Social Networking Strategies: The digital aspect of the mobile applications and the availability of the stats and options to deploy even the smallest changes help product owners create better and more sophisticated digital strategies.
- Better communication with the clients helps you build stronger relationships: Apps can be monitored and analyzed thoroughly, giving managers higher control over the app’s performance and the factors affecting it. This results in better communication with the client to answer all the client’s questions using numbers, stats, and various other matrices. This leads to easy communication of the problem and finding probable solutions used to tackle such situations.
- Brand identity, image revival, and reinforcement: Mobile applications can be used as efficient branding tools. Owners can deliver their campaign’s deliverable directly to the customers who have already downloaded the app and visit it a few times a day.
- Identify and access the recurring business: Apps offer a detailed analysis of data, helping a business identify the probable recurring businesses and retain them for longer periods. The data collected through apps can create better strategies and make informed decisions when pitching to a probable client.
- Better customer engagement: Apps can be used as a one-on-one channel of communication with customers. App managers can deliver all/any information, media properties, run campaigns, send personalized messages for any reason to the users, and allow users to communicate back to the development team, making it an effective two-way communication channel.
Facts on Media and Entertainment Apps
Here are a few facts on how entertainment apps have dominated the app industry and are expected to continue in the future.
- 67% of smartphone users utilize gaming, entertainment, news, and sports apps.
- 52% of game app users are women.
- Games were the highest downloaded app category in quarter 2 of 2020, with a 20% increase from the previous year, taking the total number to 2.7 billion app downloads.
- Among the top 5 categories with the maximum number of downloads, the first is games, the third is entertainment, the fourth is social, and the fifth is video player.
- Revenue from the OTT platforms is expected to grow by $16 billion in 2020.
- Ad revenue from OTT platforms will reach $158 billion by 2024.
The changes Mobile Apps are bringing to the entertainment industry:
Theatre on your palm
Mobile applications have given audio-visual media an unprecedented reach. When compared to the early days of cinema, where people had to plan for days to watch a movie, now you can watch a movie or a TV series, in the most unimaginable situations like traveling on a train, waiting for a drive, your daily commute and even the toilet.
This has also given rise to the new content makers who may be short of budget for creating “mainstream” content, but no way they are short of talent.
World at your fingertips
There is a mobile application for every service in the world. From learning new skills to workout sessions, from stand-up comedians to boutique stores, every business invests in apps and getting on with their digitization journey. This has created a digital ecosystem where you can find, interact, and collaborate with any service provider or service seeker in just a few steps.
Endless gaming
Millennials are the first generation of digital gamers. With the advent of mobile games, now it is possible to play games anytime, anywhere. The mobile application is a boon for gamers. They are so popular that several mobile makers are making special gaming smartphones focused on high performance and some of the market’s top games.
Independent Platform
Recently, many independent platforms came into existence, which changed the face of the entertainment industry forever. These independent or OTT platforms motivated a generation of moviemakers who were no longer limited by their inability to be a part of the box office and television industry.
Now anyone with skills and little capital can make their dream project, share it with the world, and get recognized.
No More Content Piracy
Using independent platforms for disseminating the content has also assured that no data is being used for making illegal sales and has been quintessential in ending data piracy, which was rampant in the early 2000s.
Businesses are exploring ways to integrate new-gen technologies like Blockchain to fight piracy in media content globally.
Dissemination & Collection of Information
One of the great uses of mobile applications is the dissemination and collection of data. You can use mobile phones as an individual unit to send or receive information for research purposes. Entertainment apps let the users exchange all kinds of information and help the content creators to curate better strategies in the future.
Marketing & Promotion
Marketing is still as important as it was 20 years ago. But the advent of mobile applications has changed the way it was conducted. With the number of app downloads, you can establish a brand’s popularity, especially in the digital entertainment sector.
You can send notifications to the user, alerts, and messages to deliver various promotions, schemes, and discount offers. Mobile apps also serve as a communication platform between the service provider and the consumer, helping create the unadulterated information flow.
The future of mobile application in the entertainment sector
What mobile applications have achieved in the entertainment industry is merely the start of something big. Lately, many of us have enjoyed interactive TV shows, which allowed the user to select what decision the show’s characters would make. The selections made by the viewer have their impact on the story, leading to multiple endings in the same plot.
Mobile apps have stretched the spectrum of creativity and enabled viewers to participate more than they ever could. With new technologies like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality coming into play, the future of entertainment with mobile applications will only get bigger and better.
Conclusion
Mobile applications have changed the way we used to get entertained. Today, we can sit wherever we want and enjoy our favorite games, TV shows, sports matches, news feeds, and do so much more.
Apps have made the limitation of place and time obsolete. It is a matter of time when other big changes will also be made with mobile applications’ help.
Immersive movie experience, first-person gaming, and real-time entertainment are just a block away. It will be interesting to see how other media of entertainment will adjust to these new changes or become redundant?
