In 1993, the average North American adult spent about 3.5 hours per day watching television. That was it. No streaming, no social media, no mobile apps, no online gaming. By 2024, the same adult spends an average of 13 hours per day consuming media across all screens combined. The content didn’t get better. Access did.

The Festival Model: Older Than the Internet and Still Growing

Public entertainment gathering predates cities. Ancient Rome ran free public games, ludi, for an average of 77 days per year by the 4th century AD. Medieval European fairs combined trade, performance, and competitive games into events that could last weeks. The format survived every major technology shift of the past two centuries: radio, cinema, television, the internet.

It’s still growing. In 2023, the live events industry in North America generated $32.3 billion in revenue, up from $28.1 billion in 2019. Global concert revenue hit a record $9.7 billion in 2023 according to Pollstar. Festival attendance in the UK reached 4.3 million that same year – higher than any pre-pandemic figure on record.

Burnaby’s Connect Fest ran for nine years on a $20,000 annual grant budget. That’s not a typo. For nine years, SFU and the City of Burnaby co-produced a city-wide community festival – five days, four neighbourhoods, hundreds of events – on roughly what a mid-size company spends on catering for a single conference. When funding was cut in 2024, the model didn’t fail. The money did.

Physical events survive not because they’re inefficient but because they do something screens can’t. You can’t algorithmically recommend the conversation you had with a stranger at a workshop. Those experiences don’t scale. That’s the point.

What changed after 1995 wasn’t that festivals declined. It’s that entertainment grew outward in four directions simultaneously, and festivals became one option among many rather than the only option.

Streaming: How On-Demand Became the Default

Netflix launched its DVD-by-mail service in 1997. The streaming version came in 2007. By 2013 it had 33 million subscribers. By 2024, it had 301.6 million paid subscribers in 190 countries and generated $39 billion in annual revenue.

That trajectory wasn’t obvious in real time. In 2011, Netflix raised its prices by 60%, lost 800,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and watched its stock drop 77% in four months. Most analysts wrote it off. Reed Hastings publicly apologized and walked back the pricing change. Then the company quietly built its content library anyway.

The broader streaming industry grew alongside it. Music streaming now accounts for 84% of all recorded music revenue globally, according to the IFPI’s 2024 report. Spotify alone had 678 million monthly active users by the end of 2024. That’s more than twice the population of the United States.

The shift to streaming didn’t destroy live music. It did the opposite. Streaming reduced the cost of discovery – fans could find artists before buying tickets. Live concert revenue grew at the same time streaming grew. The two formats turned out to be complementary, not competitive.

Video streaming followed a similar path. Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+ all launched between 2019 and 2022. The market fragmented. By 2024, the average American household subscribed to 4.2 streaming services simultaneously, paying a combined average of $61 per month. Cord-cutting was supposed to save money. It mostly didn’t.

Gaming: From Arcade Cabinets to a $282 Billion Industry

Pong launched in 1972. Space Invaders arrived in 1978 and generated more revenue in its first year than the entire film industry that year. Those numbers are disputed, but the trajectory isn’t. Gaming went from a curiosity to a cultural institution in about 15 years.

By 2024, the global video game market was valued at $282.3 billion. That figure includes mobile games, console gaming, PC games, esports, and in-game purchases. Mobile gaming alone accounts for roughly 49% of that total — about $138 billion — driven entirely by the smartphone.

Esports crossed into mainstream entertainment faster than most people realized. The League of Legends World Championship in 2019 drew 99.6 million concurrent viewers for its final. For context: the Super Bowl that same year drew 98.2 million. A video game tournament outpulled American football’s biggest annual event. Nobody at Riot Games in 2009, when the game launched, predicted that.

Online gambling sits within the broader gaming ecosystem but operates under different regulation. The global online gambling market was valued at $95.1 billion in 2024, projected to reach $153.6 billion by 2030. Mobile devices now account for about 54% of all online gambling revenue. The shift happened fast: in 2012, mobile was under 5% of the market.

The two industries, mainstream gaming and real-money gaming, share infrastructure but not audiences. Most console gamers don’t gamble online. Most online gamblers don’t play esports. The overlap is smaller than the marketing language suggests.

Social Media: When the Audience Became the Content

Facebook launched to the public in September 2006. YouTube had launched 18 months earlier. Twitter went live in March 2006. All three happened within the same 18-month window. That was not a coincidence. It was broadband internet becoming genuinely widespread for the first time.

By 2024, social media had become the primary news source for 48% of adults under 30 in the United States, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. TikTok, which launched outside China in 2017, had 1.04 billion monthly active users by 2024. It reached that number in seven years. Facebook took eleven.

What social media did to entertainment is harder to measure than what streaming did. It didn’t replace festivals or concerts. It created a parallel attention economy where the competition for time became zero-sum. Every minute on TikTok is a minute not spent watching a film, attending an event, or playing a game. Whether that’s good or bad depends on what you were doing before.

Community events like Connect Fest tried to exist partly outside that economy. No algorithm, no feed, no recommendation engine. People showed up because someone they knew mentioned it, or because they saw a flyer on Hastings Street. That model feels antiquated now. But 25,000 people attended Burnaby’s Car Free Day in 2025, its first-ever edition, and they found out about it the same way: from other people.

Four Industries, One Shift

Festivals, streaming, gaming, and social media all grew at the same time. They drew on different audiences, used different business models, and solved different problems. But they responded to the same underlying pressure: people had more leisure time than previous generations, and the cost of entertainment was falling.

The real shift wasn’t from physical to digital. It was from scarcity to abundance. In 1985, you watched what was on television or you didn’t watch anything. In 2025, the constraint isn’t access. It’s attention. And attention is the one thing that didn’t scale.

That’s why festivals still fill parks. It’s why Hats Off Day draws 60,000 people to a single street in Burnaby every June. It’s why Connect Fest, on $20,000 a year, built a genuine community over nine years. The experience of being somewhere with other people, doing something together, is not replicable on a screen. Every streaming platform, gaming company, and social network knows this. None of them have solved it.

The entertainment industry in 2026 runs on four tracks simultaneously. Each one is growing. None of them is winning.