Technology & IT | Sunday 17 May, 2015 3:38 pm |

Deloitte has presented the 2015 Media Predictions for the Middle East at the Arab Media Forum, from its 2015 Technology, Media & Telecommunications Middle East Predictions report, launched in March. The report reveals the latest trends and emerging issues shaping the TMT industries across the region in the year ahead and beyond. Deloitte was named the official Media Partner for the Arab Media Forum.

Deloitte’s TMT predictions are built around hundreds of discussions with industry executives, analysts and commentators, along with tens of thousands of consumer interviews. They are tested with clients, industry analysts, and conference attendees, while leveraging Deloitte’s international and regional TMT project experience.

“We are very pleased to present Deloitte’s Media Predictions for the Middle East at this year’s Arab Media Forum event,” said Santino Saguto, Consulting Partner and Technology, Media and Telecommunications leader for Deloitte Middle East. “We are grateful to the Government of Dubai Media Office, for honoring us as the official Media Partner for this important event, a key agent in driving forward Media industry developments.”

“In some cases the Predictions report seeks to identify the drivers behind major inflection points and milestones, such as the take-off of Digital Islamic Services, for example, and in other cases to explain why we are not expecting fundamental change, such as in the consumption of long-form television, or in print for books,” Saguto explained. “We also consider it critical to examine sub-trends, such as the increase, but also disparity, in broadband speeds and smartphone adoption, which are increasingly influencing the way we consume media in the region.”

Contrary to other trends and beliefs, Deloitte predicts that the ‘generation that won’t spend’ is actually spending a lot on media content, with millennials in the Middle East anticipated to spend up to US$15 billion on media content in 2015 (around US$120 per millennial, in purchasing power parity terms). High rates of smartphone adoption, broadband, technological advancements and increasing literacy rates play a key role in the growth of media consumption in the Middle East in 2015 and beyond. Despite these advancements however, media spending by millennials in the region is quite low in comparison to more developed markets such as North America.

In relation to television trends predictions, the Deloitte report details how total time spent watching short-form video online in the Middle East in 2015 will represent under three percent of all video watched locally on all screens. On average, the region’s viewers will consume an estimated 545 million hours per month, of short-form video (5.5 percent of global short-form estimates) in addition to watching over 23 billion hours per month of traditional long-form television (about 5 percent of global long-form viewership).

In contrast to many industry views, print is not dead, at least for print books, as global sales from print books will be five times the sales of eBooks. In 2015 print will represent more than 80 percent of all book sales in dollars worldwide. In the US, the world’s largest book market, the figure is lower at just under 80 percent, but the percentage of print is higher in other developed world countries, and even more so in the developing world. As such, the trend is expected to carry forward into the Middle East. eBooks have not substituted print books in the same way that sales of CDs, print newspapers and magazines have declined. Young people (age 18-34) are as attached to print books as their elders and read at about the same rate than older demographics, and they are willing to pay for them.