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Minister for Public Enterprise Mary O'Rourke, TD, launched Ireland's National Digital Media Conference (NDMC) on Tuesday, which will take place on 01 May at O'Reilly Hall, UCD.
The format of the NDMC has been designed to appeal to stakeholders from across the telecommunications, media and technology sectors. Delegates will be able to hear the views of leading figures in the digital and on-line arena and the event, and will also participate in a variety of focused workshops. The theme of conference is "Competitive Strategies for Survival."
The event has been organised by Digital Media Intelligence, a joint venture company formed by Perfect World and Hoson Publishing. Event sponsors include The Irish Times, Ireland.com and RTE.
Keynote speakers at the conference will include Martina King, chief executive officer of Yahoo UK & Ireland, Mary Mangan, chief operating officer of Ireland.com, Daniel Stevenson of Jupiter MMXI, and Professor Mary Lamkin, the PJ Carroll Professor of Marketing at UCD.
"We are trying to capture the concerns of the industry," explained Barry O'Neill, Partner at Perfect World. "We want to create feedback on this and create a document to voice the concerns of the digital media industry in Ireland." He said the organisers hope to then distribute that document to the industry and the government. "I think it's key that the industry here begin to define itself better. There will be a real business opportunity for digital media here in the next few years."
Over the past year digital and on-line content companies have suffered, with some facing a harsher environment than others. Internet-based content companies may have faced the most difficult atmosphere with the fall of the dot.coms in mid 2000, but many analysts now say that DSL, and the convergence of television and Internet broadcasting could change all of that.
Last month Andy Ruane launched IrelandLive Television, a 24-hour Web based digital news service. After launching the service Ruane told ElectricNews.Net, "It's all about content. Some of the infrastructure may not be there, but it will be, and now is the time to get the content out there."
Virtually all of the large research organisations tell the same story: streaming media, both audio and video, will see major growth in the next few years. Frost & Sullivan alone estimates that the revenues amassed in the European enterprise content delivery market came to USD88.2 million in 2001, but this is forecast to leap to USD976.1 million by 2007.
Meanwhile Analysys forecasts that the streaming media market will be worth nearly USD200 million in 2006 from around USD25 million in 2001. And last week Measurecast pointed out that more than 13 million hours of music, news and other radio programming was streamed over the Web in December.
Further information on the National Digital Media Conference 2002 can be found at http://www.ndmc.info.
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