ACCESS TO CAPITAL
Content industries experience specific difficulties in accessing investment capital necessary to develop new digital content applications and increase their innovative capacity. The study "Access to capital to the content industries in Europe" identified a set of specific barriers the digital content industries are facing when accessing capital:
- There are no proven business models for on-line content services, and ssers usually expect Internet content to be free. As a result, many content businesses struggle to find sustainable business models and prove viable.
- The cost of creating content suitable for a European-wide market is high. Content is expensive to create and to maintain, and in Europe content it gets worse by the variety of different languages and cultures. This, on the positive side, creates niche markets, but on the negative side it increases the costs of marketing.
- Content is a "soft good" and in many cases it is easy to copy and difficult to protect, hampering the business potential.
- Traditional content players have difficulties moving into e-business, due to high costs of migrating legacy systems.
- Venture capitalists do not appreciate the distinctive nature of content-driven business, where intangible assets form the value proposition.
The eContent programme will make important contributions to address these issues.
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