2025 Rankings of Most Important Commercial Trends in Global Media Technology Sector

This is the first of a series of articles that discuss select findings from Devoncroft’s 2025 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), the largest annual global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands.

Measuring the Most Important Trends in the Global Media Technology Sector

Devoncroft Partners’ annual global study of the media industry – the Big Broadcast Survey (BBS) – has been conducted for the past 17 years, making it the longest-running and most comprehensive study of the media and broadcast industry.

A staple of the survey since its first iteration has been tracking the most impactful technology trends. In 2009, global respondents ranked ‘High Definition’ (“HD”) as the most impactful trend. For most of the 2010s, ‘Multi-Platform Content Delivery’ was the top trend, giving way in recent years to ‘IP Networking & Content Delivery.’

Large, representative samples are the only way to reliably track and anticipate technology adoption in the global media industry. We very much appreciate the time and effort that respondents devote to the BBS each year.

The 2025 BBS Global Trend Index

The 2025 BBS Global Trend Index ranks the industry trends that BBS respondents believe are the most important to their organization’s commercial success over the next 2–3 years.

For the 2025 edition, we presented BBS respondents with a list of 22 industry trends and asked them to select the one trend that is “most important” to their business, one trend that is “second most important” to their business, and the other trends (plural) they consider “also very important.”

We then apply a statistical weighting to these results, based on how research participants ranked the commercial importance of each trend.

Please note the goal of this question is to help clients gain insight into the business drivers behind the respondent’s answer. Therefore, respondents were asked to rank these trends in the context of the commercial importance to their business, rather than “industry buzz,” or “cool technology,” or marketing hype.

The 2025 BBS Global Trend Index is shown below.

When reviewing the data presented above, readers should note the following about the 2025 BBS Industry Global Trend Index:

It is a measure of what research participants say is commercially important to their businesses in the future, not what they are doing now, or where they are spending money today
The chart above is visualized as a weighted index, not as a measure of the number of people that said which trend was most important to them
It measures the responses of all technology purchasers (i.e. non-vendors) who participated in the 2025 BBS, regardless of company type, company size, geographic location, job title, etc. Thus, the responses of any demographic group such as a company type or geographic location may vary widely from the results presented in this report.

For those parties interested in a more detail review of the data gathered in the 2025, multiple reports for immediate delivery.

How Trends are Selected for Inclusion in the 2025 BBS Global Trend Index

Since its origination, the objective of the BBS has been to measure the market developments most relevant to business and technology decision makers in the global media sector. Each year, before releasing the survey, we spend a considerable amount of time seeking feedback on all aspects of the survey.

As part of this process, the composition of the BBS Global Trend Index is reviewed in conjunction with Devoncroft clients, media technology end-users, and a variety of domain experts. New trends are added to the BBS Global Trend Index when BBS stakeholders believe that the value of this additional trend information outweighs the resulting distortion of the year-over-year comparisons.

A deliberately conservative strategy is used when considering adjustments to the index. By keeping changes to a minimum, we allow for a more straightforward comparison of how trends were ranked versus previous iterations of the survey.

Based on discussions with clients, end-users, and experts during the planning stages of the 2025 BBS, we made a few targeted changes to the list of trends presented to respondents. No trends were removed. ‘Ad Tech’ was modified to ‘Ad Tech / Monetization’ and ‘AR / VR / Metaverse’ was altered to ‘AR / VR / XR.’ Two new trends were added: ‘Vertical Video’ and ‘Quantum Computing.’

Analyzing the 2025 BBS Global Trend Index

‘IP Networking & Content Delivery’ was the top ranked trend by global media technology buyers and users in 2025 – and by a larger margin than recorded in the 2024 index. This is the fifth consecutive year ‘IP Networking & Content Delivery’ received top ranking in the BBS Global Trend Index (and the sixth time in the past seven years).

There is tremendous excitement for ‘AI / ML / GenAI’ technologies throughout the media industry. But we aren’t measuring excitement; we are measuring perceived importance to future commercial success.

BBS respondents ranked ‘AI / ML / GenAI’ in the #2 position in 2025, the same position recorded since the 2023 BBS Global Trend Index. Though again, as noted above, the margin between #1 and #2 increased in 2025. The observation is more of a statement on ‘IP Networking & Content Delivery.’ As a reminder, the BBS Global Trend Index includes all geographies, organization types, and job roles. To many respondents in this year’s survey ‘AI / ML / GenAI’ is the most important trend. However, by definition, a much larger many view ‘IP Networking & Content Delivery’ as more important to near-term commercial success.

Further analysis of the results of the 2025 Big Broadcast Survey will follow in subsequent posts.

The information in this article is based on select findings from the 2025 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of media technology industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of technology vendor brands. Several thousand media professionals in 100+ countries took part in the 2025 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever conducted in the broadcast and media industry. The BBS is published annually by Devoncroft Partners.

Granular analysis of these results is available as part of various paid-for reports based on the 2025 BBS data set. For more information about this report, please contact Devoncroft Partners.

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