The Medium Is Driven by Content

This is the second post in our short series, Fail Fast in the World of Volumetric Video.

In Part 1, we focused on garbage in, garbage out. The point was technical: if the capture is wrong, everything downstream becomes more expensive. Part 2 is about the business side of that same problem. If the content does not create repeat demand, the medium does not scale.

That may sound obvious, but it is one of the most important lessons the volumetric video industry has had to learn over the last decade. A new medium is not established by the capture stage alone. It is not established by the renderer alone. It is not established by the compression format, the playback device, or the demo.

All of those matter, but none of them are enough by themselves. Content is what makes audiences show up. Content is what makes distributors invest. Content is what makes hardware ecosystems mature. Content is what turns a technical capability into a repeatable market.

New Mediums Are Adopted Because People Want the Content

Media history keeps showing us the same pattern: new formats become meaningful when audiences want the content enough to change behavior.

Sports helped television become essential because fans wanted to watch the game live. Britannica describes sports broadcasting as one of the last frontiers of live consumption in traditional mass media and notes that professional sports leagues and college sports provide the regular programming that fuels the sports broadcasting business model. (britannica.com)

Movies and premium entertainment helped drive home theater and optical disc adoption because consumers wanted better access to films at home. DVD was not adopted because people were fascinated by polycarbonate discs. It was adopted because it offered a better way to watch content people already valued: movies, TV shows, bonus features, better picture, better sound, convenience, and ownership. Variety reported that by 2002 roughly 80 million DVD players had been sold, making DVD the fastest-adopted consumer electronics device at the time. (Variety)

Surround sound followed a similar pattern. The technology mattered, but content created the pull. Dolby Stereo existed before Star Wars, but the success of Star Wars helped make audiences and theaters pay attention to what better cinema sound could mean. Denon’s history of Dolby describes Dolby Stereo as a four-channel optical format that launched in 1975, while the 1977 debut of Star Wars made the world take notice. (Denon)

That is the lesson for volumetric video. The technology matters. The stage matters. The renderer matters. The compression matters. The playback device matters. But none of those alone establish a medium.

Capture Stages Do Not Drive a Medium, Medium is Driven by Content

Over the last 10 years, much of the volumetric industry has operated from a similar assumption: build the stage, then wait for people to make content with it.

That approach created a lot of impressive technology, but it did not create a durable market. A capture stage creates capacity. It does not automatically create demand. It creates supply. It does not automatically create an audience. It creates a technical service. It does not automatically create a repeatable content category.

That distinction matters because, by 2022 and 2023, the volumetric and broader mixed-reality ecosystem had already started to pull back. One public example was Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture Studios program. Lowpass reported in January 2023 that Microsoft had laid off the team running its Mixed Reality Capture Studios and noted that Microsoft’s partner studio network included locations in Los Angeles, London, Seoul, and Tokyo. (Lowpass)

That does not mean every company failed or every stage disappeared. Some companies pivoted. Some narrowed their focus. Some moved into services, sports, tools, or other areas. Some are still operating. But the broader lesson is hard to ignore: the idea of a volumetric capture stage was often more exciting than the content being produced inside it.

A capture stage is infrastructure. It is not a content strategy. It is not an audience strategy. It is not a distribution strategy. It is not a business model.

There are exceptions. Sports has continued to show real promise. Some independent, experimental, and interactive VR projects have treated content, stage, and technology as one creative system. Those efforts matter. But for much of the industry, the pattern was different: build the stage, show the demo, and wait for the content market to arrive.

The market did not arrive at the scale the industry expected because capture stages do not drive the medium.

The Early Use Cases Were Shaped by the Stage

Most early volumetric capture stages were built around a practical limitation: they could capture one or two people at high quality, or a few more people at lower quality. That technical limitation shaped the imagination of the industry.

If the stage can capture one person, then the industry naturally thinks about telepresence, celebrity captures, brand activations, short performances, fashion, training clips, interviews, educational demonstrations, and limited interactive experiences. Those use cases made sense given the capture envelope, but they were also narrow.

The industry was often asking, “What can we capture?” instead of the more important question, “What content will audiences come back for?”

That is the difference between a demo and a medium. A demo proves something is possible. A medium creates repeat behavior.

Telepresence Was Tried Again and Again

Telepresence was one of the most obvious early volumetric use cases. The pitch was simple: what if you could feel like you were in the same room with someone who was thousands of miles away?

The idea makes sense on paper, but the behavior did not match the vision. Volumetric telepresence asks users to change several behaviors at once. They may need to enter a capture environment, use a new playback device, accept a new meeting format, solve spatial audio, and participate in a communication workflow that is more complex than a video call.

Even VR-based work collaboration has struggled to become a durable mainstream behavior. Meta’s own help documentation states that Horizon Workrooms is being discontinued on February 16, 2026. (Meta)

The problem was not imagination. The problem was adoption. Volumetric telepresence asked users to change too much behavior for too little everyday value. It also required expensive capture infrastructure, playback infrastructure, audio infrastructure, and a reason to use it repeatedly.

That reason never became strong enough.

Brand Experiences Created Attention, Not Repeat Demand

Brand activations were another major category for volumetric video. Fashion shows, movie promotions, parade activations, concert moments, celebrity captures, AR experiences, and one-off campaigns all gave the industry opportunities to show what the technology could do.

These projects can generate attention. Some are creative. Some are technically impressive. Some help brands tell a story in a new way. But brand activations are usually designed to be temporary. They support a campaign, a product, an event, or a launch window.

That matters because the audience is often showing up for the brand, the celebrity, the movie, the artist, or the event. They are not necessarily showing up because they want more volumetric video.

If someone watches a volumetric fashion experience because they like the brand, that does not mean they are now a recurring audience for volumetric fashion. If someone interacts with a movie promotion, that does not mean they will seek out volumetric media next week.

Brand experiences can create attention, but they rarely create repeat demand by themselves. Without repeat demand, a medium does not scale.

Shopping Wants Utility, Not Just Immersion

Shopping has always sounded like a natural volumetric use case. What if you could walk through a store from home? What if you could try on clothes virtually? What if you could see furniture in your house before buying it?

There is real value in 3D product visualization. Shopify has reported that merchants using 3D commerce experience an average 94% increase in conversions, and its Shop product updates have similarly pointed to 3D and AR previews as tools for increasing buyer confidence. (Shopify)

But that does not mean volumetric video automatically becomes the future of shopping.

The distinction is important. Product visualization can solve a practical problem. It can help someone understand scale, fit, material, or appearance. That is useful. But a fully volumetric shopping experience is a different question. Most online shopping is built around speed, search, comparison, checkout, and returns. Consumers often want less friction, not more.

So the shopping use case has to be judged carefully. Does volumetric video reduce returns? Does it increase confidence? Does it increase conversion? Does it help sell high-margin products? Does it solve a specific problem the existing e-commerce workflow cannot solve?

If the answer is yes, it may be valuable.

If the answer is simply, “Now shopping is more immersive,” that may not be enough.

Education, Training, and Remote Medicine Had Budgets, but the Workflow Was Not Ready

Education, training, and remote medicine have always sounded like strong volumetric use cases. They are large markets. They have real budgets. They can benefit from spatial understanding, human presence, demonstration, and interaction.

There is evidence that immersive training can be valuable. PwC’s VR training study found that VR learners reported higher confidence, and that at scale, VR training could become more cost-effective than classroom or e-learning approaches in certain scenarios. (PwC)

That matters, but VR training value does not automatically mean volumetric video becomes the winning implementation. The real question is not whether volumetric video can improve the experience. The real question is whether the improvement justifies the cost, workflow, deployment, content updates, headset management, IT support, accessibility, staff training, and maintenance.

In many cases, the answer has not been strong enough. The technology was interesting, but the workflow was too expensive, too complex, or not enough of an improvement over existing methods.

That is not a criticism of immersive education or training. Those areas will continue to grow. The point is more specific: volumetric video has to justify its additional cost over the alternatives.

Concerts Have Content Demand, but the Experience Is Not Solved

Concerts are different because the content demand is real. Fans care about artists and the true fans, they pay for premium audio and video experiences.

But concerts also show why content demand alone is not enough. A volumetric concert is not just a visual experience. It is an audio experience. If the volumetric capture looks impressive but the audio does not feel like a concert, the experience breaks.

Spatial audio, live object-based mixing, performer movement, synchronization, playback behavior all become part of the product. That is a much harder problem than simply capturing an artist volumetrically.

Concerts may still become an important use case, but the industry has to solve the complete media experience, not just the visual layer. The content demand exists. The medium still has to deliver the experience the audience values.

Production and Visual Effects Are Real, but Cost Pressure Is Brutal

Production and visual effects are another logical use case. Capture actors volumetrically. Recut the scene later. Move the virtual camera. Change depth of field. Reframe a performance. Reuse a scene in multiple ways.

The creative potential is real.

But production is not only a creative environment. It is a cost environment. If a volumetric workflow adds capture complexity, specialized crews, delayed review, uncertain cleanup, or expensive post-processing, it becomes hard to justify unless it clearly replaces something more expensive or enables something that cannot be done another way.

This is also where generative AI changes the conversation. Regardless of anyone’s opinion about AI creatively, if a generative workflow becomes cheaper and good enough for certain shots, it will compete with volumetric pipelines. That has always been the pattern in production technology. Tools win when they reduce cost, increase control, improve quality, or unlock a new creative result that the market values.

Volumetric capture will have a place in production and visual effects. But it will not become mainstream simply because it lets filmmakers move a camera after the fact.

It has to make the production better, faster, cheaper, or meaningfully more flexible.

Sports Is the Clearest Use Case

Sports is the use case that makes the most sense today, not because it is the flashiest, but because the content already works.

Sports already has recurring events, loyal audiences, media rights, sponsors, broadcasters, production infrastructure, and distribution. S&P Global estimated that U.S. TV and streaming sports media rights payments totaled $29.25 billion in 2025 and projected that they would exceed $37 billion by 2030. (S&P Global)

Sports also continues to dominate live viewing. SportsPro reported that NFL games accounted for 72 of the 100 most-watched U.S. TV broadcasts of 2024, according to Nielsen ratings. (SportsPro)

That matters because sports does not require volumetric video to create a new audience from scratch. The audience is already there. The content is already recurring. The business model already exists. The production ecosystem already understands the value of camera angles, replay, analysis, sponsorship, and broadcast innovation.

This is why sports is different. Volumetric video in sports does not have to be a separate experience. It can become part of the broadcast itself. The first scalable use case may not look like a consumer asking for “volumetric video.” It may look like a broadcaster using volumetric capture to make the existing sports broadcast better.

Canon’s Free Viewpoint work is a useful public example. Sports Video Group reported that Canon’s Free Viewpoint volumetric system was used for the 2022 NBA All-Star Game, with more than 100 Canon Cinema EOS-based cameras and lenses inside Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to enable virtual camera movement through volumetric capture. (Sports Video Group)

That is the kind of use case volumetric video needs: a use case where the content is already strong enough to pull the medium forward, and where volumetric capture can improve an existing business rather than asking the audience to adopt an entirely new behavior.

Sports also has repetition. Games happen constantly. A one-off brand activation does not create enough operational learning, but a season does. Every game gives the pipeline another chance to improve capture, calibration, automation, compression, distribution, replay language, analysis, and monetization.

This is why we often think about the future of volumetric sports as spatial sports media. It is not just about creating a 3D asset. It is about giving production teams new ways to tell the story of the game, while still fitting into the business model and viewer behavior that already exist.

That is why sports keeps coming back as the clearest path.

The Optical Disc Lesson

The optical disc industry is a useful comparison because DVD did not become a mass-market format because consumers were fascinated by the disc itself. It became a mass-market format because people wanted movies, TV shows, bonus features, quality, convenience, and ownership.

The content pulled the format forward. Then the hardware followed. Consumer electronics companies built players. Prices dropped. Retail channels expanded. The format moved from early adopters into the mainstream. The Consumer Electronics Association declared DVD the fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history in 1999, and one industry report from that period directly tied DVD’s success to timing, content availability, and falling prices. (Digital Broadcasting)

Once entertainment content created the market, other sectors followed. At its peak, DVD was not just a Hollywood format. It became a general-purpose delivery format used for training, education, fitness, software, corporate communications, product tutorials, direct marketing, and countless other non-theatrical applications.

But the broader market was pulled forward by content people already wanted.

That is the lesson for volumetric video. If the next 10 years produce more capture stages but the content does not change, the outcome may not change either.

Another stage coming online is not enough. Another renderer is not enough. Another compression claim is not enough. The industry needs content that audiences want to experience repeatedly.

The Questions Need to Come Earlier

Volumetric video will not become a medium simply because the technology works. It will become a medium when the content is strong enough to make the technology worth using.

That means asking harder questions earlier:

• Who is the audience?

• What do they already watch?

• What behavior are we asking them to change?

• Does the volumetric version improve the experience enough?

• Will they come back?

• Will they pay?

• Will sponsors, broadcasters, platforms, or distributors support it?

• Can the workflow scale beyond a one-off?

  
  

If the answer is no, the use case may still be interesting. It may still be a great demo. It may still teach the industry something. But it probably will not establish the medium.

The capture stage does not drive the medium. The renderer does not drive the medium. The compression format does not drive the medium. Content does. The medium is driven by content.

Right now, the clearest path forward is content that already has an audience, already has a business model, and can use volumetric video to make the existing experience better.

That is why we keep coming back to sports.