http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/media-hubs/5056877.article
Along the banks of Glasgow’s River Clyde, in an area once dominated by ship-building, is a thriving cultural quarter bustling with digital media, hot-housed innovators and inward investment.
At least that’s the vision of Creative Clyde, one of a string of attempts around the world to build mediacentric zones to help shift economies away from heavy manufacturing and financial services, and into creative, technology and science industries.
“Media is ripe for change because it is the point of convergence for so many industries, from games and broadcasting to big data analysis and even biotech. But many media cities use the term without really defining it,” says Michael Joroff, senior lecturer at MIT and consultant to the world’s first purpose-built media city in Seoul, as well as Abu Dhabi’s Twofour54 and MediaCityUK in Salford.
“Some clusters aggregate media companies in the hope that they will work by serendipity,” he says. “The other way is to think about creating a whole ecosystem that recognises how media works.”
Joroff classifies iCity at London’s Olympic Park and London’s Tech City in the first category, and cites Twofour54 as the most focused example. “Often the ideas behind media cities are flawed,” says Niall Duffy, chief executive of Mediasmiths, which consulted for MediaCityUK.
“A successful hub or cluster has to be more than a property deal offering cost-effective office space and network connectivity. There need to be compelling services on top of the infrastructure to attract SMEs and promote innovation based on a deep understanding of how digital media firms operate. A ‘build it and they will come’ approach will not work.”
Most planned media cities have an anchor tenant, such as the BBC at MediaCityUK. Pinewood Shepperton has evolved to house 300 suppliers on site but its plans for new complexes in Atlanta and Malaysia rely on attracting multiple smaller companies onsite or in the vicinity.
Twofour54 chief operating officer Wayne Borg lists four components of a successful media city strategy: developing talent, supporting entrepreneurship, providing infrastructure to enable production, and connecting with the industry to ensure a sustainable model.
One component, though, trumps even these. Media folk, perhaps more than those in other sectors, prefer social environments to sterile business parks.
“You can create a cultural centre from scratch on green or brownfield sites, but media itself is not viable without the support of transport networks, hotels, shops, bars and restaurants,” says David Phillips, chief executive of systems integrator TSL.
Social engagement is encouraged at Twofour54, both in campus café society and at formal quarterly meetings for all tenants, explains Borg: “It’s important that companies in the zone are aware of each other and the projects on which they could potentially partner.”
While essential to a buzzing work/life environment, such infrastructure is not something that can be birthed overnight. Pointing to the intellectual hubs around the MIT campus and Silicon Valley that emerged in the 1960s, Joroff says it takes 10-15 years for clusters to take hold, and 30-40 to fully mature.
“Clusters develop because of access to peers who like to socialise, even if they don’t work together,” says Nigel Walley, managing director of media consultant Decipher.
“Clusters aid the flow of deal-making, in which proximity to the broadcaster or platform makes business sense. Another reason is jobs. It’s no surprise that people move around Soho because everyone knows everyone. Working remotely, you don’t get that.”
Soho may be the archetypal media cluster, but as Duffy observes: “W1 is the last place you’d build one today because of its cost and limited space to expand.”
Cheaper option
Even without an industry focus, Chiswick Park has attracted a significant number of media companies, including
Disney and Discovery, in part because operational costs are cheaper than in central London. Satellite firms have gravitated to the location too. “Companies such as ours allow multinationals to grow and breathe,” says Loft London co-founder Davide Maglio. “At some point, broadcasters hit capacity and outsource things like special projects or archive services.”
The symbiotic relationship between large enterprises or anchor tenants and smaller suppliers is seen as essential to breeding a vibrant cluster of innovative media. “Companies are attracted to being part of a group that shares services and collaborates,” says Stephen Brennan, chief strategy officer at Dublin’s Digital Hub.
“A second attraction is access to talent. Once you have a collection of companies with access to human resources, training and skills, you have a pool of capability to tap into.”
The model works best when smaller ‘connector’ companies work closely with larger fi rms, “with the connectors focused on new ideas, new markets and new technologies – something that is hard to build inside a more corporate environment,” says Duffy.
Mediasmiths’ The Landing at Media CityUK is one example. Another is research lab iBurbia Studios, run by Decipher from Chiswick and designed to sit within media clusters.
Brennan says multinationals approach innovation by sourcing niche expertise across different disciplines: “I’m not saying we incubate lots of joint ventures, but clusters do encourage lots of informal connections that lead to JV business developments or partnerships.”
Modern media cities might be devised in CAD software and spreadsheets, but clusters have emerged more naturally in Soho and Hollywood. There are also organic groupings in Paris, Berlin and Cologne.
In the UK, there is a loose triangle between Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith and Osterley in which can be found Chiswick Park’s media collective, TV and telecoms firms
TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin, plus the BBC, playout farm Red Bee, and a host of digital specialists including Perform, Shazam and Showcaster. Sky Studios, Ealing and Teddington Studios add traditional TV and film expertise that stretches to Wembley’s Fountain Studios and on to Pinewood.
Networking group TV Triangle has been formed “to attempt co-ordination so we can extract the benefits of being a cluster,” explains Walley, a co-founder.
“There is a general sense that we should be attracting start-up media tech companies to work closer to established companies in the triangle. This can encourage innovation, provide access to mentoring, links to potential big client companies, and create a focus for funding activity. This is happening without co-ordination, but we feel we can super-charge it.”
Initially slow to respond, broadcasters are now taking note. Sky and UKTV are hosting networking events with TV Triangle this summer.
Walley would like to tap government support, particularly in light of its backing of Tech City, which promotes Silicon Roundabout’s (Old Street/Shoreditch) mix of digital boutiques and major players like Cisco, Google and Amazon.
“The government should broaden its horizons to include central and west London for a world-beating Tech City,” argues Walley. “There is clearly a growing outbound level of international activity happening here that people want to publicise, and also a sense that we need to keep reminding the world why west London is a great place for inward investment from international media companies.”
The jury is still out on the success of MediaCity UK, but it’s been operational for barely three years. Critics say the area has yet to unify the digital start-ups embedded in Manchester’s Northern Quarter with Salford’s monolithic new builds.
Joroff says its “purpose remains undefined”. Others think there is sufficient weight being thrown behind Media CityUK that success is inevitable.
Phillips notes “the new buzz generated by students from Salford University”, while Duffy thinks Media- CityUK will come into its own once fellow BBC hubs in Glasgow and Wales are more closely integrated by fibre. On-site facility Dock10 harbours ambitions to extend its cloud-based production pipeline globally.
“The first target of a media city is to establish itself as a domestic centre of excellence,” says Duffy. “International enterprises will follow because it offers the best route into the local market.”
Media zones are mushrooming in the Asia Pacific region. “Demand for content in that region, both domestic and international, is pretty much off the scale,” says Andrew Smith, strategy director at Pinewood Shepperton.
Chinese venture
Chinawood, Pinewood’s joint venture with Seven Stars Entertainment, will be based in Tianjin, near Beijing International Airport. The 800,000 sq m base for film and media production is part of a wider Chinese taxfree ‘culture zone’, modelled after the special economic zones that made the country a manufacturing superpower.
In Korea, the opening of the world’s second tallest building next year will complete construction of Seoul’s digital metro polis, while the Malaysian government has proposed a media city (advised by TSL) in Kuala Lumpur around the new home of national broadcaster Radio Televisyen Malaysia.
Arguably the most ambitious scheme, though, is Singapore’s 200-hectare One North project, which comprises not one but three clusters devoted to media, science and technology.
Joroff says: “These spaces are designed as much to fuse content creation with digital technology as they are to test environments for how we will all live and work in future surrounded by digital media.”
MEDIA HUBS: AT A GLANCE
Mediapolis (Singapore)
Twofour54 (Abu Dhabi)
Digital Media Hub (Dublin)
Chiswick Park (London)
Dutch Media Hub (Amsterdam)
Creative Clyde (Glasgow)
Dubai Media City (Dubai)
Seoul Digital Media City (Seoul)
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