“The dialogue between the film-industry stakeholders has been extremely useful for the European Commission and has already led to concrete results,” stated head of the European Commission’s MEDIA Unit Lucía Recalde, as she opened the second edition of the European Film Forum at the Black Nights Film Festival. 21 November saw film-industry professionals not only from Europe, but from across the whole world, gather to discuss the most pressing challenges of the digital audiovisual era. Under the title "Breaking Windows: Tackling Convergence in the European Media Landscape", the forum organised several talks that aimed to further understanding and bring about new developments within the profession.

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Recalde established a clear agenda, stating the European Commission’s goals: nurturing the next generation of professionals, making the audiovisual industry more entrepreneurial, making subtitling and dubbing more accessible, improving promotion, finding financing models to better combine public and private sources, and allowing access to content across borders in Europe in order to adapt to the clash between the industry's appetite and territoriality rules.

This topic was the main pillar of the "Left Behind or Leading Ahead" debate. The European Commission’s Digital Single Market cabinet expert, Jörgen Gren, set out some of the current interests of the institution - namely, working towards copyright enforcement, broadcasting support, the reduction of piracy, a stronger collaboration with digital platforms and, most importantly, a cross-border market.

“We don’t want to take away what works (the territoriality system); we just want to make things easier for people. There is a very high demand, and over 60% of film lovers use piracy every week to fulfil their interests. There is an enemy out there in piracy, and we strongly believe that by granting access to content to people who travel, or who live in different countries or close to borders, we can help fight that,” explained Gren. “There is also no interest for us in boosting huge, pan-European platforms. Big companies don’t have problems with borders, but small companies do. The problem here is more of a scale one, and we want to scale up globally,” he continued.

Following the Digital Single Market agenda that the EC has been putting in place for years now, Gren declared that a report on content portability between countries would be ready next year. He said, “Our rules on copyright were established before the digital development, and things and people’s behaviour have changed, so we have to get people back on track, paying for content, by working towards this option.”

An interesting example of a globally scaled market, the app market, was addressed by Rovio chief market officer Ville Heljari, who stated, “The good thing about market fragmentation for apps is that releases in certain territories help test the product (…), although the US is still hegemonic in this area.” Gren added, “For Europe, the app market has become fundamentally important: it is expected that four million jobs will be created in this market in 2018 across the continent.”

So how can we understand the market - be there territoriality limitations or not - so as to better help products? “Big data is one of the keys for our industry,” stated UNIC president Phil Clapp. “Data should flow as easily as possible, should be open, and should be used for new purposes and business advantages,” Gren weighed in. “We are already supporting a lot of big-data programmes in MEDIA, but there are a lot of complexities that need to be explored by us first so that we can have our own proposals and requests next year, towards a free-flowing data situation within the EU.”

The forum also shone the spotlight on how to adapt the window chain to the digital shift, and how to collaborate in order to make the most of this, through an illustrative talk with the American Entertainment Merchants Association’s Mitch Mallon, expert Missy Laney, TrustNordisk’s Susan Wendt and media strategist Laura Anne Edwards. A third panel on diversity in the global media market for another area of media that’s rapidly opening up to worldwide standards, television, was organised with the participation of Viacom Media Networks’ Nusrat Durrani, Taipei Film Commission’s Jennifer Jao, Danish channel TV2’s Anders Leifer and NHK Enterprises’ Yoichiro Takahashi.

The next stop for the European Film Forum will be Brussels, where the European Commission will celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the MEDIA programme with a two-day programme (read the news).