2023 Digital Content Creation Report

Description

When breaking down the Tool Providers, and Technology Trends JPR describes and offers data for the current state of the businesses that offer the services and the companies that make the tools for those services – looked into the higher-level technology trends which are having an impact on the M&E industry.

The DCC Report contains: 

• Current and projected growth demands forecasted from 2021 – 2025
• A Historical look at the market along with current trends and drivers
• A detailed breakdown of the key services that make up the content creation supply chain and pressures affecting it
• A look at the companies and providers in the DCC industry
• How the industry is incorporating automation, AI, and the cloud

The DCC Executive Summary

At the start of 2023, the demand for content has gone through the roof. For instance, theater chains are complaining that they’re not getting the quality content they need, and audiences have complained that they reached the end of streaming content during the pandemic in 2021. In fact, the television industry has all but made the transition to OTT content delivery, but the business model is evolving. It’s unclear that the next-gen broadcasters such as Netflix, HBO Max, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, PBS Passport, will be able produce or obtain enough compelling content to sustain voracious TV audiences. The technology to distribute and produce shared experiences has created an unprecedented global audience that is forever connected and craving novel content.

It’s not clear however, that content creators are meeting industry demand. The DCC toolchain is also going through a transition.

The DCC software tools market was worth $  billion in revenues in 2022, an increase of 68% from 2018 at a CAGR of 14%. We’ve maintained a list of 100+ companies actively selling tools for content creation for film/video, game development, audio, and imaging. It is updated annually using financial data from public companies and estimates from private companies.

Over $ billion has been invested in the DCC companies from 2017, and there have been over 55 mergers or acquisitions.

There are over 170 companies serving the market with over 80 types of products.

This report focuses on long-existing limitations in toolchains that has affected the supply and demand for digital content but also how the demand for better tools and more content has affected the evolution of tools. The report has three main sections: Markets, Service and Tool Providers, and Technology Trends.

There will be a shift in business models to subscriptions and services which will add to the demand. This represents a is a $  million to $  million market growing in the 10% to 15% range (excluding the game engine revenues of Unity and Unreal). Including those companies, the 3D tool market is over one-billion dollars with the same growth profile.

Due to the market growth of the entertainment and promotional industry and the explosion of social media, this market has grown and should continue to grow through to 2030.

The Markets we are covering are being affected by:

• Unprecedented demand for 3D content in a wide range of fields.
• The shift to cloud-based distribution for scripted content and games.
• The emergence of subscription-based business models has fundamentally shifted the demand for high-quality content, from blockbusters to hours of episodic and playable content.
• Cloud-based workflows are transforming opportunities for creative professionals.

On top of this, content creators, advertisers, and influencers are seeing 3D as a differentiator for their social media content, which far outpaces games and scripted content in terms of the amount produced in a given year. Finally, we are looking at the potential emergence of XR, virtual humans, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse drawing investment and talent looking for the next-generation online experience and revenue opportunity. (NFTs are not inherently 3D.)

From 2022 to 2025, we see a demand for high-quality 3D content expanding beyond the peak years of production from 2016 to 2019.

That said, 3D content creation is fundamentally changing to allow the use and combination of reality-based content made from scans, pre-made models, and even AI-generated content. We think this trend will enable the participation of more creators. The concept of professionalism is broadening with the arrival of new marketplaces for stock content, including models, textures, materials, etc. There is also the frightening undertone of machine-made content eliminating industry jobs.

In order to segment the market according to the relative size of participating companies, we looked at company revenues and investment activity. We came up with five classes of companies. This does not include investment companies, companies in other industries, and government/education.

	Class	Companies	Percent
$100M+	5	74	12%
$9M+	4	121	20%
$0 to $9M Revenue with Investment	3	54	9%
$0-9M with no Investment	2	120	20%
No Inv. Estimate	1	174	30%
Min. Digital Presence	0	49	8%

Company Classifications

Introduction

The report has three main sections: Markets, Service and Tool Providers, and Technology Trends. Markets is a view of the primary drivers of the M&E industry. We have found various forms of entertainment are creating an unprecedented demand for digital content.

This report is written for:

• VPs of marketing types who need help understanding the market and their position in it.
• Financial investors who want to know how many and how much about the major segments of the market and the major companies within those segments.
• Entrepreneurs, developers, etc. who want insight about the people they’re building stuff for.

In all cases they want to understand how big the market is, how will it grow, what are the trends driving growth, etc.

One of the main purposes of the report and the research is to understand the market for people paying for tools or services to create digital content. That will also suggest the demand for workstations and computers to run those programs.

The DCC Report Table of Contents:

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• What is DCC?
  • The Industry in General
  • Key Organization Metrics and Trends
  • Employees
• Developer on Staff
  • Company Organizations
  • Trends
  • Production Locations
  • Services Offered
  • Digital Content Creation Tool Suppliers
  • The evolution of Media Creation
  • Speaking the Same Language
  • Taking the Long View
• Asset formation
  • Sustainability and Environmental Impact
  • Content Creators
• Key Markets
  • Methodology
  • Scripted Content
  • Content Drives Streaming TV Market
  • Peak TV
  • Repurposing catalogues from DVD to OTT
  • The shift to episodic
  • Video Editing
  • Photo Editing
  • Games and Simulation (or Interactive Experiences)
  • Game Developers
  • Simulation
  • Creator / Social / Metaverse
  • Influencers
  • Social Media
  • Promotional
• Service and Tool Providers
  • The VFX pipeline
  • Animation
  • Khronos node graphing in glTF
  • VFX
  • Game Development
  • Game Engines
  • Software Used by Indie Game Developers
  • Modders
  • Asset creation
  • Compositing
  • Post
  • Compositing Software
  • Character Preparation
  • World Building
• Virtual Sets
  • Virtual Studios
  • LED Video Walls for Virtual Sets
  • Virtual Production
• Technology Trends
  • The Verses
  • Collaboration
  • Omniverse
  • Omniverse Collapse the Pipeline
  • Gateway to 3D
  • AI/ML
  • Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling
  • Intel
  • AMD
  • Generative AI
  • IDEA and ITMF
  • Cloud
  • Rendering
  • The Ray Tracing Market
  • Film and Video
  • Game Industry
  • CAD
  • Importance of Materials Library
  • Open Source and Software Development
  • Reality and Motion Capture
  • Software Defined Workflows
  • Asset Management
  • The realities—Augmented, Virtual, Mixed, and Extended reality
  • Augmented Reality
  • Virtual Reality
• Investment, Mergers and Acquisitions
  • Investment
  • M&A
• Summary and Conclusion
• Appendix
  • DCC Tool Suppliers
  • Software DCC Tool Categories
  • DCC Tools and suppliers
  • Khronos glTF Compression System
  • Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD)
  • Video editing Companies
  • How Game Streaming Turned Into A Lucrative Career
• Index
  • End Notes