Wales’ creative industries are being watched by the world, as hundreds of delegates travelled from as far as Japan to attend the PLAYBACK festival in Cardiff. YouTube UK & Ireland’s MD joined international media leaders at the event, as Media Cymru marked five years of building the country’s creative economy.
Over 500 attendees saw first-hand how Media Cymru has built an innovation ecosystem in one of the UK’s fastest-growing creative economies, developing projects ranging from interactive horror movies to 3D printed sustainable movie props.
Alison Lomax, Managing Director, YouTube UK & Ireland, said: “Wales has a thriving ecosystem within the creative industries. There’s a huge opportunity here to bring together that ecosystem of traditional broadcasters, production companies and content creators. We [YouTube] see that over 80% of UK-created content is watched overseas, so the opportunity to build global audiences is absolutely huge.”
Lomax was speaking at the two-day showcase in Cardiff, where Media Cymru – the consortium established in 2022 through UKRI’s flagship Strength in Places Fund programme to make Wales a global hub for media innovation – revealed the results of five years supporting research, development and innovation (RD&I) across the Welsh media sector.
Lomax continued: “I’ve been really inspired by the vision from hearing from S4C, as well as independent production companies, about understanding there’s a real sweet spot now in Wales of bringing together the craft and the knowledge and experience of traditional production companies and broadcasting with a new, more agile, content-led, digital-first storytelling. The talent is here. And there’s a whole global audience out there.”
The figures* tell a striking story. Media Cymru has backed 180 R&D projects, engaged more than 1,000 creative innovators, and trained over 1,000 industry professionals – 100 of which have gone on to new jobs. Supported businesses have created 300 additional jobs, tripled their rate of IP creation, and attracted £1.2m in further funding.
Over 60 new products, services and experiences born from that R&D have already reached the market and end users. For every £1 that Media Cymru awarded in grant funding, more than £15 in additional turnover was created by those businesses, compared to a non-Media Cymru funded company, and more than £10 in Gross Value Added. Exceeding average growth in the region, supported businesses have generated over £20m in additional annual export sales.
Against that backdrop, the wider Cardiff Capital Region media sector has grown 84% since 2017, over twice the rate of any other UK city, pushing Cardiff into the UK’s top three cities for media production.
Professor Justin Lewis, of Media Cymru, said: “What’s most encouraging about this data isn’t just the scale of it, but what it tells us about the model itself. We set out five years ago to test whether targeted R&D support could genuinely shift the trajectory of media businesses in Wales, not just top up their turnover for a year or two.
“The evidence now points to something more structural, that funded businesses are building the kind of intellectual property and long-term capability that changes how competitive and innovation enabled they are. That’s the real measure of whether an innovation ecosystem is working, and it’s why PLAYBACK is showcasing something with genuine staying power.”
In 2017, Sir Peter Bazalgette led an independent review of the UK’s creative industries, which led to the strategic investment that paved the way for regional funding of programmes like Media Cymru. Speaking at PLAYBACK, he said: “We had an idea in 2017 that the government should support the funding of creative clusters around the country for the creative industries in different areas.
“Later, Media Cymru secured its funding because of the strength of their ideas. Over the five years, they ran it really well, and they grew and grew the cluster of people that they were funding, and the cluster of ideas and innovation that was coming out of it. It’s been a hugely successful project that has continued to attract new investment from outside of the UK government. That shows that there is enormous potential and real opportunity here in Wales.”
Stephen Kinnock MP, Secretary of State for Wales, was also in attendance to celebrate Media Cymru’s successes. Speaking to audiences from PLAYBACK’s main stage, Stephen Kinnock, said: “Media Cymru is transforming the Cardiff Capital Region into a global hub for media innovation. Wales’s creative and media sector is something the world is paying attention to, and the UK Government is focused on helping it develop and grow.
“We have created our Brand Wales project to do just that – a Wales Office initiative with a simple but ambitious purpose – to attract investment into Wales, create good jobs and to grow our economy – including the creative sector.”
Media Cymru’s ambitions to make Cardiff a global hub for media innovation were reflected in the work of Consortium partner, Wales Interactive, who issued a worldwide call-out for writers, directors and producers to train in the format of interactive movies, drawing submissions from as far afield as Hollywood.
Using its in-house scripting tool, WIST, Penarth-based Wales Interactive – recognised as the world’s second-largest publisher of interactive movie content after Netflix – helped a cohort of 12 to develop branching narratives across genres from horror to thriller to action. Studio Dark Rift Horror then developed their proposition with Wales Interactive into Dead Reset, an interactive horror game which launched at the PC Gaming Show to an audience of nearly 80 million people watching worldwide.
Richard Pring, Co-founder of Wales Interactive, said: “That support allowed us to be more ambitious and take risks we simply could not have taken on our own. It pushed us in a very different direction, helped us grow the pipeline of interactive talent globally, and has solidified our position at the forefront of interactive movies worldwide while allowing us to keep evolving what we do.”
Speaking to Media Cymru’s commitment to Green was engineering and prototyping company, Rusty Design, based in Bridgend. Progressing through Media Cymru’s Seed, Development and Scale-Up Funds across five years, Rusty Design tackled waste in TV and film production, where huge sets are often built and discarded within tight timeframes. The company developed a way to produce physicalised props – including a life-sized Formula 1 car replica – using large-scale 3D printing, biodegradable material, and methods to reduce of material needed by 80%, without compromising on strength.
Morgan Williams, Founder, Rusty Designs, said: “The funding enabled us to come in from a different angle, introducing new pipeline methodology and using 3D printing and large-scale 3D printing to create sets of prototypes. We were able to drip-feed into the commercial pipeline. So we started off as an idea, but over three and a half years, we’ve now had a couple of larger commissions that will be out at around about Christmas.”
