Circular Entertainment

Late last year, Nokia released an interesting bit of news in the market. That, within the next five years, as much as “25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities.”

This is no ordinary soothsaying by Nokia, but the result of a global study (by The Future Laboratory, UK) of trend-setting consumers (9,000 consumers aged 16-35 years from 17 countries) and their digital behaviours and lifestyles, investigating the future of (their) entertainment.

According to Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia, the study, titled A Glimpse of the Next Episode, revealed that “people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups – a form of collaborative social media.”

[I remember Apple’s Steve Jobs say something very similar way back in 2000.]

Mr Selby explained, “The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group’s entertainment.”

Nokia has dubbed this phenomenon ‘circular entertainment’ and is pinning some of its business hopes on it. Having watched Nokia’s N-series advertising all through last year, I’m pretty sure Nokia had wind of this trend much before the study was done.

Perhaps the world is already headed in this direction. Perhaps it’s Nokia’s way of engineering a consumer trend in order to capitalise on future marketing opportunities. Whatever the case may be, ‘circular entertainment’ seems like an inevitability!

You can access the Nokia press release here.

[Citation: Nokia press release, 3 December 2007 – Nokia predicts 25% of entertainment by 2012 will be created and consumed within peer communities.]