Paschal Preston

Broadband and digital ‘content’ in the EU-25: Recent trends and challenges

Abstract This paper focuses on recent trends and issues in the EU-25 countries related to one key broadband application area: digital media ‘content’ applications. It draws upon recently completed research addressing current and future uses and applications of broadband in the EU-25 area. The paper presents key findings from the BEACON project concerning the broadband content trends and issues in the EU-25 countries. First, the paper briefly considers recent literature on broadband and digital media innovations as well as the policy context in Europe, which has an important influence on framing supports for innovation in content and digital media. Next, it addresses a number of key issues that impact upon the creation of content services. These include the high cost of content production and the difficulty of forming attractive business cases given the uncertainties related to user demand, and the IPR and copyright regimes. It will also consider users’ patterns of engagement with broadband content and emerging user applications. Next, the paper discusses whether broadband is reaching a ‘tipping point’, whereby broadband access is becoming the norm and in the next five years we will see the emergence of innovative, dynamic content services. The paper considers whether recent moves by three sets of significant actors (media corporations, the advertising sector, and EC regulators) could be early signs of a tipping point in favour of the creation of and more focused support for broadband content services.

INNOVATION AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE DIGITAL MEDIA SECTOR

Academic research on service innovation has highlighted the distinct characteristics of services innovation, the knowledge complexes involved, and how services can be autonomous sites of innovation. It also highlights that successful services innovations are often not technology based but can depend on new organizational or managerial practices or marketing and distribution strategies. This paper makes an empirical and a conceptual contribution to this literature by focusing on one sub-sector of the services sector: digital media applications and services. Conceptually, this paper is interdisciplinary and draws upon a range of work on innovation and production in media and communication studies, innovation studies, evolutionary economics, and sociology. Empirically, this paper draws on ten years of qualitative case study research focused on innovation in the digital media sector in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Europe. More specifically, we draw upon research on the internet, mobile, and games sectors. A key finding emerging from this research is that, despite the widespread popular and academic focus on technology and codified knowledge, a much broader knowledge base (particularly tacit, creative and non-technological knowledge) underpins successful innovative practices in digital media firms. This paper examines the combination of creative ideas and skills, social learning processes of content creators, management, market and business knowledge that underpin the development new digital media applications and services. It argues that a better understanding of the character of knowledge inputs and the innovative practices in digital media companies may contribute to a better understanding of innovation in the knowledge economy.

Competition in the telecommunications infrastructure: Implications for the peripheral regions and small countries in Europe☆

Abstract Recent technological, economic and policy shifts have placed the issues surrounding future communications infrastructure development and competition at the centre of European debates in the mid-1990s. This article examines how realistic, viable or universal is the vision of competing, alternative telecommunications infrastructures and facilities, especially in the case of the smaller and less developed economies/regions. This article critically assesses the challenges posed by, and implications of, competition in the telecommunications infrastructures in the less favoured regions and smaller economies of Europe.

Ireland—From Neoliberal Champion to “the Eye of the Storm”

Abstract Capitalism has proved to be a dynamic, growth-orientated and enormously productive system which has utterly transformed the material standards of life in most regions of Europe over two centuries. It is a mode of production that is not only inherently expansive but also constantly evolving, prompting and demanding incessant changes in technological, organisational and institutional forms, where the only constant is change as “all that is solid melts into air.” One consequence is that capitalism is also prone to various forms and types of periodic crisis. Indeed, quite unlike most prior modes of production, economic crises in capitalism arise not from sun-spots or other forces in (first) nature but from multiple tensions or contradictions intrinsic to the system. In this paper, we will be especially attentive to the evolving role of both financialisation and mediatisation (in particular) with respect to the evolving forms of economic crises and attendant processes of creative destruction, including “austerity” in contemporary capitalism. We examine such issues by taking the Ireland as our case study, a relatively small country on the western periphery which featured in a central, if not leading role in the wider crisis of Eurozone area. We address how a crisis originating in excessive exuberance in the private banking and property sectors, very soon morphed into a crisis of the wider economy and especially one of state funding. This paper also examines how the key moments and features of these recent crises were constructed and reported in major news media.

Creative Inputs as the Cause of Baumol's Cost Disease: The Example of Media Services

This article explains that the most important aspect of W. J. Baumols idea of cost disease is the fundamental intuition that there are some types of labors contributions that are irreplaceable by new technologies. These contributions are indentified as “creative inputs”: original ideas, concepts, actions, and inductive solutions to ill-defined problems. This article also empirically demonstrates that media content activities are stagnant, whereas activities involved in the distribution and exhibition of media content are progressive.

Convergence, Crisis and the Digital Music Economy

In this chapter we consider the concept of convergence in the context of the complex relationships unfolding between technology, socio-economic factors and the contemporary music industry—the ‘canary down the mine’ of the digital media industries. We observe that when it comes to the music industry, technology convergence trends have generally been defined in rather negative terms. In essence, they are generally represented in terms of a fundamental ‘crisis’ especially for the recorded music sub-sector. Here, we move on to critically interrogate the conventional wisdom that implies technological trends and convergences are leading to some sort of fundamental decay or decline in the power and role of the music industry. Instead, we propose that whilst the initial disruptive effects of the radical new digital technologies may have induced a certain ‘crisis’ for the prevailing models and practices of the recorded music industry, these have also prompted and been accompanied by new opportunities for restructuring and reshaping of the sector’s scope and operations.

Social networks, legal innovations and the “new” music industry

Purpose – Digital technological innovations are commonly perceived to be radically disrupting the power or role of corporate actors within the music industry and their established industrial practices and interests. In particular, the internet is widely regarded as having produced a “crisis” for the music industry. While such assumptions reflect the predominance of technological deterministic thinking in relation to the music industry, this paper aims to draw upon historical insights from past research on radical technical innovation processes to inform this approach to examining some of the key innovations that have occurred in the music industry in the digital era.Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on a range of qualitative data obtained primarily from a recently completed Irish‐based music industry research project, primarily comprised of interviews conducted with key music industry informants and personnel.Findings – Key findings indicate that ongoing legal innovations, combined with the w...

Globalisation, Imperialism & Communication Studies:

Abstract This article is orientated towards a contextual reading of the MacBride Report. This suggests that the Report can be fruitfully read as “socially situated” (shaped by its essentially political rather than scholarly role) and it also implies attention to the many changes in the framework, structures and flows of international communication since 1980. The article notes selective aspects of the concerns and orientations which informed the MacBride Report, particularly those addressing structural features of unequal resources and power in a post-colonial world which, in turn operate to shape communication inequalities. It finds such issues have been somewhat neglected or inadequately addressed, both in the communication studies field and in international policy discourses in more recent times. The article describes certain recent developments in neighbouring fields which closely resonate with aspects of the earlier report — in particular, the growth or revival of interest in the concept of “imperialism.” Whilst imperialism has become something of a neglected (if not quite taboo) term in communication studies in recent times, it is now addressed more openly in other influential domains. This paper argues that reengagement with this concept is now overdue and potentially fruitful for both the contemporary “academic” communications studies field and for the agenda of “policy” research issues.

Crisis, digitalisation and the future of the internet

Purpose – The goal of this paper is to explore how an approach upfronting the notion of crisis and related restructuring processes may yield certain strategic stakes and anchor points by which to identify and measure the forms and extent of unfolding changes or innovations broadly understood. One key objective of this exploratory project is to undertake a comparative investigation of the major commonalities and differences between the specific forms, features and manifestations of “crisis” tendencies and counter‐tendencies in two sub‐sectors of mediated “content”: the music industry and the news media industry.Design/methodology/approach – The paper engages with issues and concerns relating to these two particular sub‐sectors of the media and cultural industries and considers relevant concepts and indicators of crisis and recent developmental trends in these domains. It introduces the background setting and implications of “crisis” and introduces some distinctive concepts and other aspects of the approach...

Creativity and the positive reading of Baumol cost disease

This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (i.e. widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most important aspect of cost disease is a fundamental intuition: some types of labour provide particular contributions to various production processes that capital and new technologies are not able to replace. The implications of these findings are discussed.