What Immersive can learn from the streaming market
And what it *should* pay attention to
Hi everyone and Happy New Year. As many people in the XR community look up to 2026 being the year headsets inch closer to the mainstream (thanks in part to the Steam Frame that Valve will start selling in the first half of the year), we are also already seeing the inevitable reports about the tech being a flop - on the 1st day of the year, nothing less!
On my end, I have spent much of Q4 2025 thinking about the broader streaming market in general - the WBD deal and Netflix-Paramount feud providing for much material and a fresh outlook on the industry at one of its inflection points, but also knowing that YouTube dwarfs all of these players, with a 10x larger user base, more revenue and a greater share of daily watch time.
My conclusion is that as the VR market grows, it will have to borrow a page (or two) from the overall entertainment industry textbook - if it has any ambition to become a self-sustaining economy for a sizable pool of companies. As you know, I have been involved since late 2024 with Anthony Maes to develop Acute Immersive, a streaming service for Immersive Video - so I have a direct incentive to anticipate these trends.
Below are three things that I think we need to see happening if we want to grow the XR market:
Audience analytics
Advertising market
Algorithmic recommendations
Let’s dive into them.
Note: I am using the terms “VR”, “XR”, and “Immersive” quite interchangeably here, but this view focuses on Immersive streaming (i.e. linear video) as interactive gaming is much more mature already, but
1. Audience analytics
The maddening thing about VR headsets is that nobody knows how many there are. Platforms such as Meta, Apple and Google keep their numbers closely guarded - and, as a result, investors have no tangible data to estimate the size of the VR audience.
Think about it: if you are a brand, media, or anyone making content, you have no way to know how many people you might reach, were you to produce shows or apps for VR. There are workarounds of course - such as extrapolating buyers of a headset from the number of reviews on its corresponding app on the stores, but these methods are not within the reach of your average marketing department, who just wants numbers.
This is the problem that we aim to solve with Acute Immersive, within a medium-term horizon of 2-3 years: providing accurate numbers about the VR audience that can be trusted by a media buyer, an advertising agency, or talent in music & sports.
How many people watch Immersive Video?
How many of them spend money on VR entertainment?
What are their demos, user profiles and overall consumption habits?
All these questions we want to be able to answer, with the overarching goal to establish the ROI of Immersive Entertainment for new & external investors.
I will be giving a talk at SXSW in March, to share our findings from the first year of operating Acute. This will be as cold and matter-of-fact an analysis of the VR market as can be, and hopefully it can become a yearly checkpoint of the industry’s pulse.
2. Advertising market
Following an understanding of the audience of Immersive - who watches what, how many people there are etc - the second step required to build a healthy, sustainable ecosystem is the development of an advertising market.
Any media - movies, news, podcasts, TV - needs to subsidize the distribution (and by extension the production) of its content in order to reach critical scale. This solution addresses problems on each end of the media supply chain: most people prefer to watch free stuff, and brands need to find a way to grab people’s attention.
In a fully mature, extremely commoditized economy such as YouTube, this transaction occurs through programmatic bidding, where buyers pay for advertising space - before or during a video for example - and sellers (media creators) are responsible for maximizing their audience, by making the most compelling content.
We could include advertising networks to the Acute offering, but this would be for the moment limited to the type of small 2D surfaces that you see on the mobile web - not exactly a premium experience, and there is simply not enough traffic in XR yet to generate significant revenue for the sellers of ad space - i.e., the media producers.
Instead, what we will do - and this is an open call, reader! - is to revert to the good ol’ days of advertising through manual sales, meaning that if a brand wants to reach the XR audience inside headsets, it can pay content producers in order to display its logo before their videos - or during, or after.
We think there is a real opportunity for brands here, since audiences in headsets present an attractive feature set: for one, they are much more attentive to the content they are watching, being immersed in it without distraction. Second, they exhibit behavioral traits that are highly desirable for advertisers: disposable income, willingness to spend a premium, innovation-seeking, not afraid to be a trailblazer, etc.
For some brands, we are highly confident that advertising in VR can help them reach potential buyers in a very engaging way, and we want to build the platform that will prove that assumption - and attribute a concrete ROI to Immersive media.
3. Algorithmic recommendations
Finally - and this has been a key to the growth of Netflix, and its current takeover of Hollywood - is the algorithmic recommendation of what to watch next - again here, deriving from a deep understanding of an audience through analytics.
If you look at the current streaming market, there are two types of services. On one end, digital-natives are optimizing their programming to keep their audience engaged (YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime): these are growing both in market share and absolute number of users. On the other end are legacy media whose editorial decisions are concentrated in a few powerful executives (Paramount, HBO, AMC). These are, in short, dying, and most have already been bought - primarily for the value of their catalog that will be milked over in FAST channels for decades to come.
I am not saying that the content itself should be driven by analytical decision-making - novelty is not an average - but if there is one thing that the modern media landscape has taught us, it’s that knowing what to present to who, when and why, is key to a sustainable business model - and that is, after all, what we are looking for.
That’s it for today! if you like what you are reading, please subscribe - or, even better, get in touch. I can help you make sense of the emerging XR market, and how to ensure your Immersive project is a success with Acute Immersive.