Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions offer insights that will help you and your business succeed in the year ahead. The annual report is based on global research – including in-depth interviews with clients, industry analysts, global industry leaders and more than 8,000 Deloitte member-firm TMT practitioners.

1. #DeloittePredicts tmtpredictions.ca

2. Phoning it in: Mobile
payments (finally) start
to go mainstream
2015: #DeloittePredicts This year
will see a 1,000% increase in the
number of global smartphones used
at least once a month to make an
in-store contactless payment.
TMT1PREDICTION

3. Make it a snap to pay
with an app…
For the first time, stakeholders from
banks and merchants to credit card
companies and device vendors are ready
to adopt the short-range, near-field
communication wireless technology that
enables mobile payments.
TMT1PREDICTION

4. …but it will take time
to put tapping on top
Overcoming technical and security issues will pale
in comparison to getting consumers who’ve spent
decades choosing between cash or charge to cross
the digital divide. Only one in 20 smartphone
owners will be tapping by year’s end.
TMT1PREDICTION

5. Show TMT the money
2015: #DeloittePredicts Notwithstanding their reputation
as digital pirates unwilling to pay for content, millennials in
North America will spend an average
of $750 annually on media content.
That’s up to 15% of their income and,
on a percentage basis, more than older
generations will be spending.
TMT2PREDICTION

6. Traditional content
down, but not out…
18- to 34-year-olds are spending less
on content than in the past, but with
over 80 million of them in North
America, they will spend a cumulative
$60 billion in 2015 on books, movies,
concerts and festivals, games,
streaming video like Netflix, and even
traditional TV services.
TMT2PREDICTION

7. TMT2PREDICTION
…though new
challenges abound
Some part of millennials’ share-of-wallet has
shifted to tech and telecom: they are likely
to pay an average of $3,000 per year for
hardware devices and telecom services
that make those devices useful. Content
is the likely target for cost-cutting, though
it’s a generation that shows it will pay for
content it really wants.

8. Page not turned on
turning actual pages
2015: #DeloittePredicts Print books will
account for more than 80% of books sold
in the developed world, despite tablets,
e-readers and smartphones
being everywhere.
TMT3PREDICTION

9. Print’s charming…
Unlike other digital formats, like music
and movies, 18- to 34-year-olds are just as
attached to print books as older generations.
They like how books smell, and they like the fact
that other people can see what they’re reading.
You can judge a book by its cover…
TMT3PREDICTION

10. … but profits are distributed differently
Despite the preference for print, the number of brick-and-mortar
bookstores is down 50% over the past decade, with publishers,
authors, e-tailers and retailers still sorting out how to divide
profits. There may be a difference in how the brain remembers
what was read on a digital screen or paper page, and more
research needs to be done.
TMT3PREDICTION

11. Euro-provision
2015: #DeloittePredicts “Click-and-collect” locations – drop
boxes or special sections of a store that hold online orders until
customer pickup – will for the first time surpass 500,000 locations
in Europe’s five largest markets (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and
the United Kingdom). Click-and-collect locations are already in use
at some Canadian grocery stores and shopping centres. Will they
become as common here as in Europe?
TMT4PREDICTION

12. TMT4PREDICTION
A necessary retrieval…
Click-and-ship as the only option for an
online order is so 2014. Increasingly,
e-commerce from both online pure
plays and brick-and-mortar retailers are
providing options for consumers to
receive orders at home, in-store or
elsewhere, reviving a concept
pioneered in Canada that was a
casualty of the original dot.com crash.

13. …with critical
supports in place
Even if click-and-collect options
become table stakes, all retailers
must monitor how these pickup
boxes impact margins and be
prepared to rapidly adapt or
abandon initiatives.
TMT4PREDICTION

14. Short video’s
(very) high bar
2015: #DeloittePredicts Short-form online video
clips of less than 20 minutes’ length will represent less
than 3% of all video watched this year.
TMT5PREDICTION

15. TMT5PREDICTION
Growth does not equal height…
Billions of users and double-digit, year-over-year increases
does not a giant make. Global audiences will cumulatively
watch more than 12 billion hours of
long-form video (aka TV!) daily,
more than the 10 billion hours
of short-form clips that will be
consumed over an entire month.

16. …so look who’s
watching, and paying
Short content tends to be music, how-to videos, clips of
traditional television and toys being unboxed – with
revenues of about $5 billion. This compares to long-form
video drawing 82 times more advertising and subscription
revenue ($410 billion) in 2015 and at least 1,000% more
revenue over the next decade.
TMT5PREDICTION

17. Game of Phones
2015: #DeloittePredicts The refresh
cycle for smartphones is getting longer,
and shorter, all at once. Of the 1.4 billion
smartphones that will be sold in 2015,
more than a billion will be upgrades.
TMT6PREDICTION

18. Hold ’em for some…
Smartphone sales will still grow 12% in 2015, but that’s
down from 47% just three years ago. More durable
hardware, split budgets for multi-device owners and less
tech-obsessed late adopters to the smartphone market will
extend the time between renewals for many.
TMT6PREDICTION

19. TMT6PREDICTION
… fold ’em for others
But true refreshes for reasons of want,
rather than need, are growing, too.
Some liken a smartphone’s “cool factor”
to what cars meant to previous generations.
A status symbol that costs less than $1,000 and is an
essential tool used hundreds of times a day is the perfect
item to prompt “I want that” buyers. That’s not even
counting replacing dropped phones…

20. Work before leisure
2015: #DeloittePredicts A decade’s
worth of consumerization and Bring
Your Own Device will reverse as
enterprises once again become
the driving force behind the
adoption of new technologies.
TMT7PREDICTION

21. Ready to wearable…
In 2014 we told you wearables would be a consumer-first
product. Whoops. This year’s news is that enterprise is ready
to go big on cyber-fying workforces into a state of augmented
reality, led by the security, medical and warehousing industries.
But enterprise-first doesn’t stop there: look for companies to
be the leading edge in 2015 for 3D printing, the Internet of
Things and drones, too.
TMT7PREDICTION

22. …just don’t believe all the hype
Nearly every new technology prompts great stories about
science fiction fantasies finally being realized. But remember
that unless a technology solves a mass market need and
provides manufacturers with ROI numbers similar to the
cellphone or tablet, consumer pickup will piggyback
enterprise adoption and not the other way around.
TMT7PREDICTION

23. Put IT on the
company card
2015: #DeloittePredicts Enterprises will
buy 60% of all wireless Internet of Things
devices…and over 90% of the services dollars
tied to those devices will be enterprise, too.
TMT8PREDICTION

24. Ask not what tech can do for you…
Early adopters may yearn to connect a smartphone to their
laundry machine, thermostat, garage door and hydro meter.
But most people don’t. Apps don’t sort or fold, time-shifting
drying your laundry saves less than $50 a year and one utility’s
smart-meter dashboard got only 6% of customers to look at it
in three years. Worse, only 2% did so more than once.
TMT8PREDICTION

25. …but what tech
can do for your company
For governments and big business, connected devices are,
well, big business. While smart meters, smart grids, smart
homes, smart cities and smart highways offer only small
benefits to individual consumers, the savings to enterprises
can be 5-10 times greater. More valuable still may be the data
collected by all those connected machines.
TMT8PREDICTION

26. 3D printers
mean business
2015: #DeloittePredicts By year’s end,
one in four businesses in developed
countries will have, or be planning to
acquire, a 3D printer. That’s a 50% increase
over 2013, when that ratio was one in six.
TMT9PREDICTION

27. TMT9PREDICTION
Beyond parts largely unknown…
Consumers will purchase more than half of all 3D printers sold by
units, but enterprise purchases will account for 80% of the dollar
value of the global market and 99% of the value of 3D-printed
objects will accrue to businesses. About 90%
of this will be either rapid prototyping or
interim parts that fit into an existing
manufacturing process such as a mold,
die or cast, though finished products
will be the fastest-growing segment
of 3D-printed items.

28. …yet the adventure continues
The huge expense and technical difficulty of operating high-end
3D printers, as well as the (very) limited consumer need for
plastic-only printed objects, means that even by 2020, 3D printers
will only be occasional-use items in 10-20% of homes. However,
learning how to use these printers and their associated software
may soon make them standard equipment in schools.
TMT9PREDICTION

29. All broadband is equal
but some is more equal than others
2015: #DeloittePredicts Significant variations in home
broadband speeds will persist, with the top 10% of
average download speeds in some global
markets being five times faster than the
average for the bottom 10%.
TMT10PREDICTION

30. Practical
considerations...
Several different broadband
technologies exist, but two general
rules are that the most cost-effective
upgrades work best in densely packed
urban environments and higher speeds
cost end users more money.
TMT10PREDICTION

31. …versus the need for speed
Businesses looking to deliver over-the-top services – especially
bandwidth-intensive ones like video-on-demand – should
consider the range of broadband speeds available to consumers
in their target markets. A speed of five Mbps is considered pretty
good, but for homes with multiple users or watching HD/Ultra
HD, not all broadband is the same.
TMT10PREDICTION

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