Online Social Entertainment, OTT Content Platforms & Esports 2020-21 Growth: Here’s Everything You Need to Know About It

Due to the epidemic crisis beginning in 2020, people around the world had to submit to stay-at-home orders for their safety and to protect their communities.

The natural consequence for this situation has been a surge of many home-related businesses and entertainment.

Online entertainment, streaming platforms and esports have become extremely popular in the last two years, and that opened-up to many other businesses which were not so-popular in the past. To give you an example, today some recognized betting sites even give you the possibility of a freebet on both sports and esports, which is something relatively new for this sector.

With all that being said, let’s see some sectors which benefited the most from this unique historical period.

Online Social Entertainment

This relatively new sector blends entertaining interactive functionality with an astonishing variety of contents, including live video streaming, multi-player gaming, video chat communications and normal video streaming.

Most renown sites of this kind are:

• Twitch
• YouTube
• Woo Media
• Hi5

To support their favourite streamers, followers usually tip their “idols” or pay for special services, like playing together online or performing specific actions during streaming. To give you an idea of how much the sector is growing, Twitch (the leading service of this type owned by Amazon) managed to clock 17 billion hours watched during 2020, which is 83% higher than the 9 billion registered in 2019.

OTT Content Platforms

Over-the-top content platforms, or OTT are media services offered directly to viewers via the internet bypassing cable, broadcast and satellite television platforms.

They are usually subscription-based and video-on-demand services that offer access to mostly film and television contents. Most important OTT content platforms today include:

• Netflix
• Prime TV
• Disney+
• YouTube
• Mubi

During the pandemic, in 2020 most of the primary OTT content platforms registered incredible numbers. For example Netflix, pioneer and leader of this sector, had a growth of 807,67% in terms of clients, with 195,15 million subscribers.

Dinsey+ also registered a growth in the service’s subscriber base with over 95 million since their start. If you are not impressed, imagine that when it launched in late 2019, Disney+ predicted a “modest” growth between 60 and 90 million subscribers by 2024.

eSports

Online entertainment and esport became an extremely popular pastime in the last few years, and between 2020 and 2021 millions of people are following this trend.

Between the temporary suspension of both real sports and human interactions, esports received a boost in terms of viewers during the pandemic and became a phenomena also for many people who were never interested in such activities.

As a natural consequence of this evolution, the global esports betting market growth exponentially and market size is projected to even reach 18499.0 USD million by 2026.

Between the most important active gaming and tech companies present in the market today we remember:

• Esports Technologies
• Esports Entertainment Group, Inc.
• Golden Nugget Online Gaming
• MGM Resorts International
• fuboTV Inc.

For those interested in betting on these new forms of sports, there is also the chance of profiting from freebet promotions and the like from top-tier bookmakers in 2021. It is important though to remember to use only regulated bookmakers services and avoid non-regulated ones.

Between the most important bookmakers which gives you the chance of betting on esports there are:

• SNAI
• William Hill
• Sisal Matchpoint
• Better