A new year welcomes us. We are now staring at what could be considered the proverbial blank slate. I know I tend to regard January as just that — a new beginning, a fresh start. However, when I look at a new year, I find myself also looking back as a ways and means for preparing for what is to come. I referred to this in my blogpost at the beginning of 2021, and I often get asked about what I see coming in the months ahead whenever I sit down for panel discussions or interviews in the month of December.

“What am I seeing as the main technology trends in media and entertainment in 2022?” To answer this question, I look at how far we have come to date, and especially focus on those last few months starting in October. If you want to develop a strategy for what is coming, there is no better way than to look at where the market, the industry, and those reporting on it are leaning towards.

The Value of Home: How Working Remotely Is Impacting Our Industry

What I see changing in the next twelve months, as it continues to impact and change dramatically now, is based around remote working. And what I am finding absolutely fascinating about this trend is how those you would not expect to be adopting it are, and with incredible success. I recently travelled to meet a couple of customers at their offices, and a common response I got was “I work from home 80% of my time right now…”. I’m talking about major media companies, all finding a lot of value and worth in embracing a remote work lifestyle. This is a trend that will stay, and what is important to us and to our industry is what technology are we developing that will support a work model like this? There will be a demand for carrying out work from anywhere, completing fairly complex tasks like news production, audio and video editing, and workflow orchestration.

Finding a Place on the A List: Automation and AI

AI is without a doubt at the forefront of technology trends in media and entertainment in 2022. We recently shared on Twitter an article from TV Technology that in 2021, the most reported subject in technology was Artificial Intelligence, surpassing the topics of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (something I will discuss later in this blog post). Dalet is no stranger to the integration of artificial intelligence as many of our award-winning solutions include AI across a range of media workflows and news production. Artificial Intelligence not only takes cataloging and archiving of your media to a higher level, but also improves automation processes currently in play within the industry. As AI continues to grow in importance in production workflows and in completing tasks, automation will remain important, too. Integration platforms, such as Dalet Flex, enables and facilitates automation to tap into a wide range of tools.

A Whole New World from Home: Virtual Reality and the Metaverse

October 28 was something of a busy day in 2021. At Dalet, we were launching our newest platform, Dalet Pyramid, which introduces the principle of the virtual newsroom for storytellers to work anywhere and everywhere. At the same time, technology giant Facebook announced its rebranding into Meta, the next step in its evolution. Part of the drive to rebrand and launch Meta was due to the popularity of one of its acquisitions, the Oculus Quest. The VR headset, as reported by The Verge, shipped an incredible 10 million units since its launch in October 2020, and the Oculus companion app (required for all owners of the VR headset) was reported as one the top five downloaded apps on Christmas Eve, and the most downloaded app on Christmas Day 2021 in the US.

Defining Virtual Reality and the Metaverse as one of the top technology trends in media and entertainment in 2022 is still an understatement. It is the technological tsunami akin to the radio in the 1920’s and television in the 1950’s. The question we should all be asking in the industry is where is our place within it?

The amount of assets involved within a VR production, the management of the metadata produced in a single event, and the ability to connect multiple platforms of media — creating a truly connected environment on a global scale — will increase the demand for content management solutions. I look forward to seeing how the need for more agile, easier-to-use tools responds to this unstoppable need to produce, manage, find and deliver hordes of VR-driven content. As we discovered in 2020, our ability as an industry to adapt to the unexpected is far more boundless than we believed. As our content guru, Tee Morris, convincingly tells me, the Metaverse will bring us a whole new set of achievements that would challenge even the wildest dreams of science fiction.

A Year of Change: What Is Coming in 2022

Perhaps the greatest trend of 2022 — a consistent thread within the trends discussed here — will be remaining connected wherever you may be, something that will be increasingly important because of home-based operations. There will be a need for communicative and collaborative tools, and these tools must be able to integrate operational workflows. That will be essential to successfully tackling technology trends in media and entertainment in 2022. What will also be important to watch will be the progress from on-premises to cloud-based operations. And whereas research clearly shows adoption trends towards remote and cloud-based operations, when we speak to our customers, the realities are quite different. It’s not as straight forward as believed. This may be in part to having an on-premises investment and how a studio can graciously move that investment in a way that is non-disruptive. The move to cloud-based operations is going to be more gradual than previously projected. In fact, according to Benedict Evans’ ‘Three Steps to the Future’ December 2021 report, only 10-15% of enterprise IT spending has moved to the cloud so far, and about 20-30% of workflows.

That change is why, I believe, our focus word at Dalet in 2022 is “trust.” You cannot move forward, you cannot grow, you cannot remain relevant or competitive and challenge technology trends in media and entertainment in 2022 without change, and trust is so important to support and drive change. There is an increasing need for tech providers to work closely with tech buyers as well as partners and vendors in an industry that has gone through incredible changes so quickly in such a short amount of time. And now here we are in 2022, the road ahead appearing in flux but full of opportunities for innovation. This is why trust is so important. You need to trust your partners, your vendors, and your providers to meet the potential of what lies ahead.

I, for one, am looking forward to a trust-full 2022.