Fewer media schemes, but more great ideas, please1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTo have a great idea, have a lot of them, American inventor Thomas Edison once said.
That is probably what the Media Development Authority (MDA) had in mind when it decided to overhaul its numerous funding schemes. In order to increase its chances of getting more hits than misses, the agency announced yesterday that it will fund specific phases of product creation.
This is to encourage media companies such as film-production houses to work on refining their pre-production ideas and doing more research on, say, conceptualisation for a film script. In the eight years since 2003, the MDA was more focused on taking a stake in the final product via funding. As a result of the nearly nine-month review, 46 schemes have been whittled down to only five.
These schemes cover development assistance, production, marketing, talent support and enterprise development. They apply to seven sectors, namely film, music, broadcast, animation, publishing, interactive media and games.
Mr Kenneth Tan, MDA’s assistant chief executive officer for industry, said before the revamp, resources for idea development were “very negligible”.
If more help for the development phase was available in the past, some media productions, like films and TV series, could have “gone further” and not be limited to Singapore and the region, he said on the sidelines of an industry briefing in Fusionopolis.
