InfoTech has pioneered the data fusion approach to forecasting the digital leisure economy to help our clients make the highest returns on content and technology investments in products for consumer markets worldwide. To forecast behavior, analyze what consumers do, not what they say. Consumer expenditures for entertainment and information products and technologies in any given country and year can be forecast, along with variables such as changes in population, GDP, inflation, disposable income, and other factors which affect spending and households. Digital leisure spending is a subset of entertainment spending, and each component of the aggregate amount can be forecast, along with variables such as historic content and platform expenditures, technology cycles, projected rate and extent of investment, and other factors which affect content and delivery technology. Consumer behavior beyond the immediate future cannot be quantifiably predicted by other means, such as consumer surveys, manufacturer surveys, or expressing qualitative information in statistical terms.
Technology is now in control of the future of consumer entertainment.
All media is becoming digital and requires technology to delivery it. Even then it can still fail in sales, competition, regulation, timing, etc. Future technology cycles can be statistically predicted by modeling the historic cycles of successful and unsuccessful technologies, benchmarking the qualities that differentiate them, and using modified Delphi expert consensus techniques. The PR bias in most technology forecasts widely found today distorts the distribution of investment capital and often backfires. Each creative content and intellectual property investment must be evaluated in the context of the scores of delivery technology options it will probably utilize over its lifecycle.