2025 – Looking Back, Looking Ahead – Maxim Jago, Futurist

[This article is part of a series where I invited media industry leaders to share their thoughts on 2025 and what it means for the future. Maxim Jago is an award-winning Film Director and Screenwriter, best-selling Author of the official Adobe Premiere Classroom in a Book, educator, Futurist, Royal Society for the Arts Fellow, and Director of the international Creativity Conference. He holds an optimistic-realist approach of future and emerging technologies, Communication, Education, and the future of humanity. Website: maximjago.com. ]

The Future is Happening Today!

In 2025, it felt like we began to see meaningful applications for AI in support of the creative process rather than simply replacing the creator. Part of this positive development lies in the meaningful application of content credentials, which indicate if media is human-only created, AI created, or perhaps a mixture of the two. This differentiation is helpful, in part, because it highlights the value of human-created media. Now that AI generated content is, on occasion, indistinguishable from “real” media, it is perhaps more important than ever that it’s flagged and viewers can know if they’re seeing something truly extraordinary, or just watching an extraordinary idea that was generated. Never mind just dealing with fake news, Generative AI has the potential to reshape our sense of reality, so these kinds of credentials are crucial.

I’ve been impressed by the quality of media produced by generative AI but for professional use we need the delivered media to be much higher quality and more flexible for post-production. For me, this means UHD resolution, 10-bit separated layers (where each visual element in a video is delivered as a separate video file, so they can be worked on separately), at any chosen duration. We’re not there yet but – soon!

Speaking of quality, it seems now, more than ever, consumers are less concerned about seeing high quality images and more concerned with being inspired (or at least engaged). I have swallowed the bitter pill and accepted that vertical video is now a norm – beyond that, it really doesn’t seem to matter to social media audiences if the picture is even in focus. At the same time, streaming platforms have set higher and higher standards for content and honestly a high-production value Netflix show looks indistinguishable from a theatrically released feature film.

Still, I heard this year that Netflix now considers TV’s to be second screens, after cell phones, and one consequence of this is that they know audiences will be checking and interacting with their phones during shows. Keeping this in mind, it rather seems that screenplays have been simplified and multiple plot-reminders have been inserted into dialogue to help viewers catch up when they take a few minutes out to scroll through social media before returning to the story on their TV. Audiences are also more impatient than ever for content to get to the point – it’s said that TikTok videos have 3 seconds to capture attention or the viewer will scroll…

It’s worth noting that social media and so-called “New Media” is just “Media” now and old-school distribution platforms like broadcast TV and even some major media sites are really considered “Legacy Media”. This is not to say those platforms have lost their power and impact but the screens people are most engaging with are the ones in their hands.

During 2025, it seemed that automation within editing systems had really begun to flower. We’re seeing generative AI features embedded inside non-linear editing tools (like Gen-Extend, in Premiere Pro) and it seems speech transcription and editing tools have become ubiquitous. Anything that reduces the grind of editing is a win because it gives us more time to get on with creating.

While we have seen some fragmentation amongst audiences online, my forecast is that we will see a gradually increasing demand for in-person experiences and, in particular, experiential theatre or media. People want to see things first-hand more and look at pixels less. Part of the benefit of in-person experiences is that the appeal is universal, so regardless of any cultural fragmentation they allow for the emergence of a true sense of unity based on shared values (or even a shared sense of humor) rather than individuated identity. A scary fake zombie is scary for everyone, just as a clown performing physical comedy is funny for everyone. Sharing an experience in-person and being moved by it together is a great unifier and brings us together. Media technologies like projection mapping, virtual production screens, AI avatars and even XR can all enhance these experiences.

Our media seems to have placed a great deal of focus on divisions between members of society and, ironically perhaps, that focus seems to have brought into clarity that we all feel more the same than we feel different – as demonstrated by the ways in which people of multiple cultures sometimes engage in popular memes like dance routines and flash mobs, and the most successful media projects appeal universally rather than requiring an audience that identifies with specific characters.

I haven’t touched on XR, of course – this does seem to be maturing but until the headsets are as comfortable as a regular pair of sunglasses, we’re unlikely to see mass adoption. When we get there, though… My goodness. With virtual humans interacting dynamically with viewers using natural language in three-dimensional space, we’ll truly have a new medium that could change the world.