Digital entertainment is becoming a new engine of economic growth

The entertainment industry is positioned for strategic growth, driven by digital transformation

MOVIE THEATRES ARE not driving this boom. Neither are record labels or cable networks. The growth now sits inside apps, streaming platforms and online gaming accounts, moving faster than most traditional media companies expected. Ontario offers a close to home example of just how big that shift has already become.

The Money Involved Is Bigger Than Most People Assume

PwC puts 2025 global entertainment and media revenue, already final, at 3.5 trillion US dollars, up 5.3 percent from the year before. The curve keeps climbing, with 4.2 trillion projected by 2030. Sound like a lot for one industry? One detail buried in that report explains why. Online betting and gambling, according to PwC, has now overtaken cinema as a revenue segment.

Ontario is not a spectator in that trend. When the province opened its regulated online gambling market in April 2022, only twelve operators were ready to launch. The regulated market processed 82.7 billion dollars in wagers during the 2024-25 fiscal year, a jump of roughly 31 percent from the year before.

One of the newer names competing for a share of that spending is Club House casino, running the same mix of slot machines and live dealer tables that older, licensed operators offer. Fifty operators now chase that same pool of money.

Try explaining that to someone who still pictures Vegas when they hear the word casino.

Where the Growth Actually Comes From

Casino games, not sports betting, do most of the heavy lifting inside Ontario’s numbers. Recent monthly reports from iGaming Ontario show a familiar split repeating itself, and it looks roughly like this:

• Online casino games take close to 82 percent of operator revenue most months, a bigger gap than most people would guess.
• Sports betting trails far behind at around 11 percent of handle and 16 percent of revenue, smaller than the game day advertising would suggest.
• Peer-to-peer poker is the smallest slice by far, though it quietly set a handle record earlier in 2026.
• More than 2.6 million accounts have opened since launch, but only around 1.3 million place a bet in a typical month, a gap worth noticing.

Global patterns tell the same story. PwC tracked gross regulated gambling revenue across ten major markets and found it had roughly doubled in four years, near 79 billion dollars in 2025 versus just over 37 billion in 2021. Ontario is riding the same wave, just with better winters.

The Boom Nobody Can Actually See

None of this growth looks like earlier economic booms. There is no new casino tower rising over a Toronto skyline, no ribbon cutting, no valet stand out front. Behind the interface, Clubhouse casino runs on servers, licensing paperwork and a compliance team, not a storefront anyone could point to.

Picture the alternative for a second. A physical casino large enough to move billions of dollars in wagers would have needed all of this before opening day:

1. Years of permits, zoning approval and construction.
2. Hundreds of on-site staff, from dealers to security to valet attendants.
3. A physical footprint big enough that residents driving past would actually notice it.

Skip all three, and you get roughly what Ontario has now. Old instincts about growth do not apply anymore. Concrete poured, cranes parked, doors opened, none of that shows up once an industry moves onto phones.

The Local Angle: Jobs and Tax Dollars

Southwestern Ontario feels this shift mostly through jobs and provincial tax revenue rather than new buildings. Officials and industry analysts have started putting numbers on that impact, though estimates vary by source. A handful of figures stand out.

1. One widely cited industry estimate puts direct and indirect employment tied to Ontario’s regulated iGaming sector at close to 15,000 full time jobs, roughly the payroll of a mid-size manufacturing plant, minus the factory.
2. That same analysis credits the sector with adding an estimated 3.76 billion dollars to provincial GDP since launch, enough on paper to fund years of infrastructure spending, a figure auditors have not independently verified.
3. The province has collected roughly 2.04 billion dollars in cumulative tax revenue since 2022, with 807 million of that arriving last fiscal year alone, more than most local budgets see in years.
4. Ontario’s 2026-27 budget projected close to 294 million dollars in iGaming tax revenue for the year, a figure that already looked conservative once the first quarter results came in.

Few of these numbers will show up in a typical pitch deck for local investors. They explain why a growing number of Ontario businesses now treat digital entertainment as a serious line item, not a curiosity. What already happened here is impressive enough on its own.