The Canada Media Fund (CMF) sees the metaverse in its soup in 2022. It makes the connection between the digital divide, separating the country’s urban centers from its more remote regions, and the accelerating shift towards a hybrid world that sets the table for the emergence of this very virtual reality. His conclusion: Canada has an interest in investing rather than suffering the consequences of this proliferation of media platforms.
The FMC published Thursday the results of an annual report on the trends to watch in 2022 in the world of the media in the broad sense – linear media such as TV or radio rub shoulders with both the Web and social networks. Big news this year: the arrival of the metaverse in the Canadian media portrait.
The term “metaverse” is popularized these days by the CEO of Meta-the-old-Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. It designates immersive digital environments that can take the form of an online video game as well as Fortnite than the virtual shows you attend while wearing a virtual reality headset.
For Canadian content producers and broadcasters, having a foothold in such digital environments and doing business there, however small, would already allow them to get to know them better and be ready when they become more popular. These slightly avant-garde producers are certainly more likely to be one of the creators of what was called ten years ago the famous ” killer app », this essential application which exposes the general public to a new medium for the first time. let’s think about the game angry Birds on the iPhone at the turn of the last decade.
We do not know today the application that will somehow oblige Madame and Monsieur Everyman to embark on the metaverse. What we do know, however, is that companies like Meta, Apple, Microsoft and others are preparing to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years to make this new digital world explorable. .
In this new kind of gold rush, the first to arrive will probably be the first to benefit from a possible emergence of this immersive medium, one can suppose.
A growing digital divide?
The metaverse is currently not profitable. Meta sunk more than US$10 billion last year into VR and generated just US$2.3 billion in revenue there. This will put off more than one content creator looking for new frontiers.
The same could be said for TikTok. The social platform of the hour suffered a loss of US$2.1 billion in 2021 and is therefore not profitable. This does not prevent thousands of Internet users from sharing content there and even trying to do business there, as influencers on YouTube and Instagram also do.
In 2022, we talk about media like we talk about technologies. The business model there is increasingly linked to the Internet and digital, where the key is not so much the creation of content as the fact of being the owner of this content, observes in an interview at Duty CMF Business Intelligence Director Catherine Mathys. “The idea is to be able to offer what you develop as original content on all the platforms you want without having to ask for funding every time. »
Here again, we sense in the CMF report that the Canadian media industry is lagging behind these new trends. Too little intellectual property is developed there and it is slow to find sustainable Quebec and Canadian cultural products in these emerging media. From there to largely explaining the decline in the popularity of French-language Quebec cultural content, there is only one step that could be logical to take: less Canadian and Quebec presence on these platforms popular with young people, less popularity with the general public of tomorrow.
There is precisely help for content creators interested in these platforms, says Catherine Mathys. “You have to experiment with these realities. This is important, because the metaverse is one more showcase that adds to the TV, the website, the mobile app…”
One of those who have understood this plurality of new media is Montreal billionaire Guy Laliberté. The co-founder of Cirque du Soleil is a major promoter of a mixed reality where spectators on site would be added to spectators present virtually from the comfort of their living room. He also jointly created with Microsoft a platform called Hanai World, which targets the Quebec entertainment sector.
“We would never have believed that the circus would be a media environment, and yet, says Catherine Mathys. Adding this option when doing circus or theater is interesting. It breaks down boundaries and eliminates distances between content creators and their audience. »
The issue is of course economic, but it goes a little further than that. Who will produce immersive content for education, health researchers, and entertainment? “It would be nice to create and innovate early enough so that you don’t have to suffer the innovation of others and then have to adapt. »
“Will we still need a helmet in ten years? We saw it with telephony: the first cell phones were the size of telephone books. Today, they fit in a watch face… The metaverse may not be so virtual after all.