This forecast charts global cinematic box office revenues and Transactional Video on Demand (TVoD) revenue, across our core demographic regions – North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), and the Middle East & North Africa (MENA).

It covers the forecast period of 2026-2032, but also includes 2018-2025 for context.

TVoD itself is dominated by Pay Per View (PPV), which predominantly consists of live events (nearly all sporting, and usually combat sports) with a limited time-shifted window. Next, Download to Rent (DTR) encompasses time-limited one-time purchases, which allow the viewer to watch a title as much as they want, within that rental window. These are usually movies. Finally, Electronic Sell-Through (EST) comprises ‘permanent’ purchases made on a platform, although the permanence of these libraries is increasingly tenuous, which does not bode well for EST in the period.

Things are in flux in TVoD, as PPV stalwarts increasingly explore tying themselves to a single global SVoD service, simplifying their operations and sales teams and netting a secure contractual return with more stability than lumpy PPV demand. It is a market in decline, but for now, it remains larger than FAST. Movie theaters have come to accept that their pre-covid heydays are long behind them. There has been some excitement in recent years, concerning unexpectedly popular films, but there are no signs that revenue will return to the $40 billion annual ballpark, unfortunately.

The future forecast cannot be understood without a retrospective examination. The covid lockdown forced the M&E industry to make major changes in an extremely short period of time, and it has taken years for consumer behavior to reach what we now consider a new post-covid normal.

For the cinema market, the initial closures were a sudden hardship, but it took two years at least before most consumers felt somewhat comfortable returning to the movie theatres. As our projection shows, the box office revenue is not set to return to pre-covid levels, but it is still growing at a steady rate.

For TVoD, the immediate loss of sports events led to a major drop in PPV revenue, with a scramble to find replacement events to fill PPV rosters. For TV and movie content, both DTR and EST took up some of the slack, as consumers the world over turned to familiar favorites and new releases to replace their traditional behavior.