As a follow-up to five trends for 2025 that we posted in Dec. 2024 about AI and perils facing media and social media, here are five additional trends we expect to hit this year.

1.  EVs and self-driving technology will continue to make inroads while still facing significant issues. The battle for EV dominance between China and the U.S. will generate coverage even as the U.S. is trailing China. We don’t have the necessary charging infrastructure or enough trained mechanics to reasonably schedule repair issues—so we also expect consumer resistance to EVs. Waymo electric self-driving taxis and similar offerings from other providers will generate a lot of coverage as they expand into new cities. But that may focus the media’s attention on another problem with connected cars: data collection by Chinese hardware and software companies. As with China-owned TikTok, the ability to track user data in cars will be seen as a national security risk. The other issue is that it currently is more complicated and takes more time to find charging stations than it is to find gas stations. Driving long distances in an EV takes more planning than driving to the same destination using a combustible engine.
2. The real estate sector will face problems, and receive significant coverage. Out-of-reach home prices are one of the biggest issue facing Gen Z, who may have to rent instead of purchase their own homes. (Owning a home has been one of the ways parents have been able to pass along wealth to their children so it’s a problem from Gen Alpha, born starting 2010, if their parents are unable to purchase homes.) We also expect to see continued problems in the commercial real estate sector, with downtown office buildings having trouble maintaining occupancy rates. As we said last year, “Some cities will see a push to convert office buildings into apartments as a way to alleviate a housing shortage, reduce commercial inventory and resuscitate downtowns that Fortune described as ‘dead, dying or on life support across the U.S.’”
3. Wearable Technology won’t go mainstream this year. Apple Watch and fitness trackers aside, Wearable Tech is a technology solution in search of a problem. Apple Vision Pro is considered cool, but it is expensive, and we have not seen people actually using them — outside of an Apple Store. That said, we do expect more wearable tech to appear this year but we don’t expect them to go mainstream until 2026.
4. The film industry still hasn’t fully recovered, and may not. Despite the success of Wicked, Barbie and other super-blockbusters in actual theaters, most people have gotten used to watching event or tentpole movies (as they used to be known) at home. Want evidence of that? Just weeks after its theater premiere, Wicked is available (for $29.99) from a variety of streaming platforms. Typically, a blockbuster wouldn’t hit the streamers for another five or six months. Our perspective is that movie theaters have lost a generation of movie goers — particularly parents of young children — and those children may look at movie theaters the way Boomers looked at old-time radio: Kind of getting the concept but having no interest in consuming media that way.
5. Streaming sector is crowded and confusing and may see a decrease in subscribers. We don’t expect consolidation in the streaming sector this year but we think that consumers are overwhelmed by too many platform choices, increasing subscription fees, increasing advertising interruptions and offerings that switch from one platform to another. If there’s an economic downturn in 2025, we expect that Americans will cutback on subscriptions because there’s no way they’re watching much more than one or two services (based on our anecdotal experience). That’s especially likely since many services have bumped up monthly fees and also are selling more advertising. (The number of ad interruptions has absolutely increased on YouTube’s free offering, which could lead viewers of short videos to switch to Facebook Reels — although there appear to be more ads there, too.) Each streaming service is trying to define its brand but the fact that some offerings seem, from the viewers’ perspective, to switch from Netflix to Max to Prime does two things. 1. Frustrates viewers trying to find the show they started watching on one service and now have to search and hope they subscribe to the new service. 2. Dilutes the brand because if many services offer the same programing at one point or another, it’s hard to know what’s distinctive about any or all of the platforms.