The Institute for International Communications (IIC) annual meeting held recently in the UK (London, October 5-7) featured, among other topics, a “streaming video roundtable”, an informative discussion of the issues surrounding growth of the VOD sector in the current regulatory climate. I was fortunate enough to be able to be in the audience (virtually) for that panel. It featured a regulator, an academic researcher and two representatives from the content industry. Informed by a number of market studies recently conducted by the research firm Frontier Economics, the panel explored the economic drivers of local content production and the relationship between production, and government regulation of the video streaming sector. The studies document that sensible regulation can make a difference. Policies that promote inward investment and allow the creative juices of AV producers to flow provide a range of benefits to consumers, local economies and culture, domestic production facilities and artistic output. Heavy-handed regulation and imposition of legacy conditions on new streaming services is counter-productive in terms of achieving growth in local content production from streaming services. Read the full article here (Local Content Production and Sensible Regulation: New Studies Demonstrate the Close Relationship).
© Hugh Stephens, 2021
