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Always looking to foster the development of ideas from Singapore, the Media Development Authority is currently revising its grant schemes. Its CEO tells
ttv
all about this and more.
Like a mother who guides her children toward their first steps, the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore was formed with the main aim of building a foundation of companies, people and projects in Singapore’s local media industry.
That meant participating in the entire process of a project: idea pitching, funding, production and the project’s internationalization. However, after a couple of years of work, the children started walking by themselves and something had to change in the cycle.
“We wanted to make it easier for companies to understand how we could help them. Reducing our existing 46 schemes to just five schemes across all the media sectors we are supporting -namely Animation, Broadcast, Film, Games, Interactive Digital Media, Music and Publishing- was a good way to do so. So rather than say a particular scheme is only for TV or film, our schemes will be able to support content production on more than one platform. This makes sense as technology is multiplying the platforms for media content to be delivered,” Aubeck Kam, MDA’s CEO, explains.
That’s why last September 2011 MDA launched its new “revised grant schemes” which seek to “position the media industry for the future” and take it “to the next level”. The production-centric nature of MDA’s old funding schemes gave place to co-investments as the main mode of funding, which encouraged companies “to think about IP ownership and go beyond service for hire”. “Now that our companies have matured, we want to help them move on to the next stage, to acquire their own IP and even share their IP across various platforms, so as to empower them to maximize the commercialization of their IP and to increase their revenue,” Kam says. Therefore, MDA’s continues to assist projects and initiatives, but from a different, more intelligent perspective.
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