Your Inevitable, Immersive Future

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Video entertainment in all its forms will become more immersive, gamified and personalized, predicts McKinsey.

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In a paper targeting the heads of entertainment companies, the consultancy advises that by 2030 sensory experiences will change the way people experience or create a story.

“Haptics and augmented reality are allowing people to experience the same things and occupy the same space,” says Jacomo Corbo, a partner in the firm. “If there’s an explosion blast in the video, everyone feels the force of the explosion or even the wind on their face.

Kristi Tausk, another company expert, elaborates on the idea. “In a horror film, right now you get scared by somebody jumping out on screen. But what if in the future, when you’re watching that movie, you can actually feel that person standing behind you? You’re in it; you’re in the movie with the actors and experiencing it with them more than we really do today.”

In the future, McKinsey imagines going to a movie theater with a game console for an experience where there’s 10 minutes of a piece of filmed entertainment up front, which then it turns into a multiplayer game.

“It’s not just in that theater; it’s across 20 different connected theaters,” says partner Tom Svrcek. “And then you can continue that game with that community when you get home to your game console or episodically over the next several months.”

Video entertainment will be personalized too, they agree. In 2030, an algorithm is going to do the heavy lifting of searching for content “to the point where the five things that it’s recommending that you view are highly, highly resonant,” says Svrcek.

All of which means that the successful, video entertainment company of tomorrow needs to think like a tech company today. Data is going to be critical — and collecting that data is going to enable an AI-driven future.

McKinsey has three further pieces of advice for CEOs wanting to get ahead of the curve.

“Most of the storytellers that we’re talking about in the 2030 period will come from diverse geographic backgrounds, diverse economic backgrounds, diverse demographic backgrounds,” says senior partner Jonathan Dunn. “The decision makers themselves must be diverse. You have to change the decision makers in your organization.

“Second, you have to believe that technology and analytics can help you identify the storytellers who the current system doesn’t identify. Third, you need to be comfortable — and even lead — with an accelerated pace of change.”