Key Issues for Media – DPP Predictions for 2025

DPP, an international association for media and technology based in the UK, published their annual predictions for the year ahead in media.

NOTE: Their website is thedpp.com

This is the ninth year the DPP has published their predictions. While the full report is targeted at enterprises and behind a paywall, here are the highlights.

1. Capex models will constrain innovation. Tight budgets and risk aversion will prevail at large companies. The Cloud is over-rated. Yes, some tasks belong in the cloud, but the business case for the cloud is becoming harder.
2. Security concerns will go beyond human scale. Media operations cannot access the resources required to protect themselves from evolving cyber threats. The CrowdStrike catastrophe that took out a number of broadcasters was a wake-up call to broadcasters and enterprises that they do not understand the technical foundation of their digital infrastructure enough to safely protect it.
3. Power will shift toward the creator economy. The balance tilts from organizations to individuals enabled by new technologies. The creator economy is the biggest threat to traditional media.
4. We’re running out of romance with AI. This year, AI will get dragged into its reality era by needing to prove it can generate results. AI innovation will far outpace adoption at any traditional media company.
5. There will be transparency fatigue and “trust washing.” Excessive transparency labelling will overwhelm audiences to the point of becoming completely meaningless. Not all transparency is created equal.
6. Deploy or die: There will be no budget for speculative development. In other words, put it into production, or stop working on it. This is especially true for projects involving AI.
7. Data is the big monetization opportunity. As AI models plateau, media content archives have increased value in the emerging training data economy. If you don’t have your media assets organized, they are far less valuable to you as an asset.
8. We’ll all have to be copyright lawyers now. As AI becomes integral to media, their vast datasets raise significant ethical and legal questions.

While some of these predictions apply more to enterprises than individual media creators, two stood out for me:

• Power will shift toward the creator economy. The accessibility of media tools combined with the democratization of production provides all of us with opportunities – and increased competition.
• AI needs to do more than simply update itself every two weeks. It needs to resolve issues of copyright and prove that we can reliably make money with it.

We’ve known for a while that 2025 is going to be a tumultuous time. It is reassuring to read that everyone in media, from small to large, is struggling to figure out where we are headed and what it all means.