The Media Development Authority (MDA) has up investments

The Media Development Authority (MDA) has upped the ante for the Singapore media industry and now expects it to achieve value-added contribution of $10 billion and add 10,000 new jobs by 2015.

Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts and MDA chairman Tan Chin Nam revealed these new targets at a press conference yesterday, as part of Singapore’s latest masterplan for the media industry dubbed Media Fusion 2015.

The latest plan supercedes MDA’s Media 21 plan which was first unveiled in 2003. Media 21 planned to add 12,000 jobs to the 38,000 in the media industry, and increase the industry’s contribution to Singapore’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 3 per cent from the then 1.57 per cent, by 2012. Based on Singapore’s GDP for 2006, which was about $210 billion, the media industry would have needed to contribute $6.3 billion in 2006 to meet the previously targeted 3 per cent of GDP.

Researchers in the interactive and digital media (IDM) industry here will also soon be getting about $20 million from the MDA to fund their research projects.

Yesterday, MDA’s IDM International Review Panel (IRP) announced that out of the more than 50 IDM research proposals received earlier this year, an initial batch of 15 projects have received the stamp of approval from the panel to get the funding, which are expected to be disbursed in the next quarter.

This is part of the $500 million set aside by the National Research Foundation last year, to boost research in the IDM industry. Announcing this at a press conference held yesterday was Paul Saffo, consulting associate professor at the school of engineering at Stanford University, and a member of the IRP. The projects recommended for funding cover primary research in games, computer graphics and image processing, virtual augmentation and mixed reality.

The five-member IDM IRP are also part of MDA’s 10-member International Advisory Panel (IAP) which is chaired by Dr Tan and counts filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, as members.

Yesterday, the IAP also gave the Singapore media industry and MDA a pat on the back for the progress made since the panel first met two years ago. Declaring that ‘Singapore’s arrived’, Mr Saffo said he felt that Singaporeans were sometimes ‘too hard on themselves’ and that there was indeed creativity in the media industry here.

The IAP also released its recommendations for the Singapore media industry, which were the product of two days of meetings over the previous two days.

Some of the IAP’s key recommendations include exploiting the music and publishing sectors, which it felt held good growth potential for Singapore.

The IAP also made other recommendations where some recommendations, such as enhancing the use of IDM technologies in sectors like education, medicine and science, were already being implemented.

Other recommendations include enhancing Singapore’s reputation as a ‘hospitable environment for creative talents to meet and exchange ideas’, as well as positioning Singapore as a place for co-creation of intellectual property.

Speaking to BT after the press conference, MDA’s chief executive Christopher Chia noted that while the IAP had commended Singapore’s progress in the media industry, there was still more work to be done especially in the area of promoting Singapore media companies in the global media marketplace.

Source: The Business Times, 21 June 2007