Hamburg.
For the last conference of my European odyssey, I've made my way to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, which plays host to a one-day conference of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research on the theme of "Finanzierung von Qualitätscontent", or "Financing Quality Content". I'm in Hamburg as a Fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, and will be speaking later today, on motivations for the creation of quality user-generated content.
We begin with an introduction by Thomas Fuchs from the Media Institution Hamburg / Schleswig-Holstein, who highlights the current problems for mainstream media - the impending demise of major newspapers in the United States, the problems with enforcing copyright (and the threats by some to move to a paid access model). One key question in this context is the future of advertising, of course - in a European context, this also touches on government rules for advertising.
In Germany, there has been a recent study examining the ability of television viewers to distinguish between advertising and programme content, which identified relatively strong skills; viewers were also happy to accept the need for advertising, but were skeptical about product placement especially in informational programmes. This provides new insights for government policy.
Nikolas Hill from the Hamburg State Office for Culture, Sports, and Media adds to this that product placement is very likely to be accepted in future government media policy, but not in all programming and only with clear warnings to viewers. This is necessary especially in this difficult time to support and sustain quality content. At the same time, the rise of user-generated content will also add new impulses, and this throws a new problem into the mix.
Finally, Alf Henryk Wulf, Curator of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation, also welcomes us to the conference, and notes the role of Hamburg as a centre for the media industries in Germany; some 11,300 media businesses operate from Hamburg. He, too, points to the difficulties in advertising - simply adding more advertising to existing content is not feasible, as this will alienate audiences; new forms of advertising are bound to become more prevalent, and this is also affecting content formats, of course.
Financing quality is a tricky question, then - and financing media content cannot proceed only in order to maximise profits, as this is unlikely to lead to quality media.
