Media industry is facing profound digital transformation which is changing the whole chain and the role of stakeholders.
European Media is faced today with the need of integration of advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, High performance computing, 5G and others and at the same time is called to tackle new challenges like fake news, data security, the role of global platform and concentration on power which are also impacting the democratic discourse.
To give European Media and Creative industries the ground to compete and playing a global key role in this new landscape, there’s the need to ensure its long-term funding sustainability and innovation with a new and stronger support action in Europe, indeed only reserving a significant slice of EU budget to European Research and Innovation this would result in European industry increased strategic role in global market.
European Media and creative sector with its uniqueness and diversity, which are the core of European values, needs a reinforced support to intervene in market failures being able to fill gaps between technological innovation, creative content production and R&I. Today the European media innovation markets misses a clear coordination and investments in the domain that are well below the range available by global powerful players.
New actors on the market are investing to improve the connection between content creation and advanced technology and have launched global created innovative media funding programme in Europe which have attracted numerous stakeholders, i.e. Google’s Digital News Initiative and Facebook’s Journalism Project.
As highlighted in the Commission’s Reflection Paper on the Future of EU Finances, Horizon 2020 has proven to be a successful instrument that attracts collaboration from 131 countries worldwide and finances 13,000 high – quality projects, and following with the status quo is not an option, in particular for Media Innovation.
It is then of utmost importance to strengthen the programme to ensure sustained R&I activities in Europe in particular in media industry where there are alarming signing the EU is lagging behind and further level of innovation and competition cannot be achieved if we do not increase the public and private investment across EU, as Commissioner Gabriel recently stated, if we want to solve demanding and pressing issues via digital transformation.
While the breadth and depth of the debate around the post-2020 MFF is addressing traditional investment domains, we believe it is necessary to create a forum to discuss the Media and Creative and Cultural Industries’ needs in terms of innovation and to explore together with the key European Institutions possible avenues for future support and funding schemes.
For these reasons I3 project is organizing a Policy Dialogue event with European Parliament. As we want to emphasize the pivotal role of the European media and creative sector and its vast creative potential for innovative services the event will be organised as a joint dissemination and communication action of running funded initiatives in the ICT for Media Innovation I3 and MediaRoad.