Entertainment Trends in 2025: Big Tech Steps Up, More Live Event Investment, Bundling Leads to Consolidation

The year 2025 could see a sweeping realignment of the entertainment space — in streaming, in live events, in the makeup of the companies themselves — with a potentially greater role for Big Tech companies that are already sinking untold billions of dollars into artificial intelligence and now may become the ultimate owners of vulnerable traditional studios like Warner Bros. Discovery. 

TheWrap did some sifting and identified five business trends in the entertainment space to look out for in 2025. Some took hold in 2024 and are primed to catch fire in 2025. As Monday’s deal for Disney to acquire 70% of Fubo shows, more live sports and other live events will shift to streaming. And look for the streaming bundles announced last year to be a precursor to full-blown streaming consolidation. 

In-real-life experience will continue to push the envelope with groundbreaking tech. Artist-to-fan direct business models are also primed to gain accelerated traction as lucrative revenue drivers for individual artists — and ultimately for studios, IP holders and franchise owners. 

And 2025 is poised to be the year that Big Tech steps up to buy major entertainment companies, with Apple and Microsoft being prime candidates for a major deal, analysts told TheWrap. Consider that Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet collectively have more than $236 billion in cash on hand.

“In the next few years, the bargains for legendary entertainment brands will be difficult, if not impossible to pass up,” producer and media studies professor Evan Shapiro told TheWrap. “You will see Microsoft make some announcements this year. They clearly want to be in the larger media business.”

Big Tech steps up to buy major entertainment 

As 2025 begins, Warner Bros. Discovery finds itself in the most vulnerable position to being acquired among its major competitors. “I don’t think there is any question that Warner Bros. Discovery is going to be sold off for parts, or as a whole, at some point in the next 15 months,” Shapiro said. “They have lost between 60% and 80% of their market value since the [Discovery] merger happened. [CEO David] Zaslav has zero answers.”

The companies primed to make a play for WBD, or other traditional entertainment players, could well come from the Big Tech world. Wall Street has previously pushed Apple as a potential buyer of Disney, largely because of Disney CEO Bob Iger’s past close relationship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs. But regulatory scrutiny under the Biden administration — and Apple’s own history of growing organically, rather than through acquisition — limited that possibility. Now that could change.

For one, Apple needs a bold new move. Its business model is becoming stagnant; the company relies heavily on iPhone sales, which continue to slow. Regulatory concerns in the European Union and competition from Chinese brands pushed down iPhone revenue by $2.7 billion to $85.2 billion in the first half of 2024, and then another 0.9% in the third quarter.

And Apple is relying more and more on growth in its Services division — where Apple Music and Apple TV+ reside — which rose 14.1% to $24.2 billion in Q3 2024, as its big hardware initiative, the Vision Pro, has not been a commercial success.

If the new Trump administration signals that regulatory scrutiny will be relaxed, as most analysts expect it will, it might be time for Apple – and likely Microsoft — to step up and attempt a game-changing acquisition of one of the traditional studios: WBD, Paramount or even Disney.

“They absolutely have the cash, of course,” Peter Csathy, chairman of Creative Media, a boutique media, entertainment and tech business advisory and legal services firm, told TheWrap. Apple alone had more than $65 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of September.

Microsoft turned heads in late 2023 when it agreed to acquire Activision Blizzard for $75.4 billion. The deal made Microsoft the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony.

Look for Microsoft, which is entitled to up to 49% of OpenAI’s profit arm’s profits, to dive deeper into the living room with television-related content backed by ads, Shapiro said. A major acquisition like WBD could give the tech giant — which flirted with movie and television production with Xbox Entertainment Studios from 2012–2014 — a content library and readymade streaming platforms.

Compared to a traditional entertainment company, a tech player could better weather the losses that could come from sunsetting declining linear networks, analysts told TheWrap. Tech companies treat content as marketing to drive their underlying core business models, but that “content is a marketing expense like any other — it need not be justified as a stand-alone business,” Csathy said.

More sports/live events shift to streaming

Sports was always important to the traditional cable bundle. And lately it has become must-have content for streaming platforms. “The immediate and unpredictable nature of live competition fuels audience engagement and attracts advertisers, which are key factors for continuing financial success in DTC,” Ernst and Young (EY) said in a recent report.

As TheWrap has reported, Netflix attracted record streaming audiences for its November boxing match night featuring Jake Paul and Mike Tyson and for its Christmas Day football games, one of which featured Beyoncé during halftime. 

But for avid sports fans, the viewing landscape has been fragmented and expensive. Sports fans have struggled to find the games they want to watch and become frustrated when they have to pay for multiple streaming services to put together a full-season package, EY said.

With Monday’s announcement that Disney was acquiring 70% of Fubo, the parties settled antitrust litigation that had blocked the Venu Sports venture with Disney, Fox and WBD, which can now go forward.

“In 2025, sports fans will be watching to see whether companies take action to improve their viewing experience,” EY said. “To keep existing viewers engaged and attract new sports audiences, companies will continue to evaluate the launch of sports-centric streaming bundles or the integration of apps and other technology to ease discovery and viewability.”

Bundles will lead to full-blown streaming consolidation

In 2024, entertainment companies began experimenting more earnestly with bundling partnerships among direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms — including Hulu on Disney+ and Disney+, Hulu and Max. Look for those to be early indicators of broader industry consolidation coming in 2025, AlixPartners, a financial advisory and global consultancy firm, said in a year-end report. 

The bundles announced over the past two years are not an end in themselves. But “bundling allows streamers to test for potential revenue synergies and operational alignment in a controlled, lower-risk environment before committing to large-scale integrations,” AlixPartners said. 

The winning players in a streaming consolidation shakeout “will combine flexibility and choice with the simplicity that consumers crave — such as seamless user experiences, unified search and discoverability, and a single interface and billing system,” the consultancy said.

Shapiro sees the bundling as a “lot of deckchair moving.” With up to 40% of new subscribers being serial churners, the traditional Hollywood companies — which inched closer to consistent streaming profitability in 2024 — should look to build a bundling competitor to Amazon’s Prime Video, not Netflix. “Amazon Prime is the one that no one cancels, it’s churn-proof” because of the bundled good shipping component, he said. 

“To me the perfect bundle would be with The New York Times, utilities, things people touch on a daily basis,” Shapiro added.

New artist-fan direct business models will gain accelerated traction

After the 2013 release of “Frozen,” Disney called off its lawyers and allowed children and parents to record their own videos on which they sung songs from the animated film – and shared them on social media. (More than 60,000 versions of “Let it Go” were posted on YouTube.) Disney’s relative leniency in pursuing copyright violations helped make “Frozen” a smash hit.  

More recently, established music artists like Grimes have shown a greater comfort level with making their voices, music stems and creative elements available to fans for them to create and distribute. In 2023, Grimes debuted Elf.Tech, an open-source software program that uses generative AI to replicate her voice and makes it available free for fans to build on top of — so long as she shares equally in the revenues generated by commercially successful works. 

Look for other IP owners, including studios, to pursue money-making opportunities in 2025 by forging similar partnerships with fans.

“This new kind of direct artist-fan engagement and business model opens up entirely new and endlessly scalable revenue streams,” Csathy said. “Franchises are primed for that.”

IRL experiences will continue to push the envelope with groundbreaking tech

In late December, Italian DJ-producer Anyma sent tongues wagging with a spectacular immersive show at the Sphere in Las Vegas. The run of eight performances, which concludes Saturday, was the first residency for an electronic artist after the venue attracted worldwide interest for featuring sold-out shows for iconic acts like U2 and The Eagles. Anyma’s run sold 130,000 tickets, the first 100,000 of which were sold for six shows in the first 24 hours, a spokesperson for Afterlife Presents Anyma “The End of Genesys” told TheWrap. Promoters then added two more shows.

Madison Square Garden, the owner of the Sphere, announced in October that it was building another Sphere venue in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Expect others to try to raise the bar even higher on in-real-life experience in 2025, which “will become increasingly important to younger audiences who crave lasting, memorable (and Instagram-worthy) shared experiences,” Csathy said.

The “flywheel” model, which brings franchise movie and television IP to life through a wide range of in-person experiences, will expand further this year as companies look to expand consumer engagement, promote entertainment content and services and generate incremental revenue outside of their “core screen-based ecosystems,” EY said.

“As executives look to recalibrate and transform to keep pace in an era of ever-present disruption, experiential entertainment offers companies the opportunity to diversify their revenue base and help to offset declines in other parts of the business, such as linear TV,” EY said.

And starting this summer, Universal is debuting its Epic Universe park in Orlando, which the studio touts as its most technically advanced theme park ever. It will expand on iconic theme worlds with The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic, How To Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk, Super Nintendo World and Universal’s “Monsters” IP.

The park’s opening will coincide with the planned June release of a new “How to Train Your Dragon” live-action movie from Universal, creating a further synergistic experience.

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