If I’m an animation company, wisdom suggests that I can locate my business anywhere. I don’t need access to heavy power. I don’t need my own motorway junction or acres of cheap land for a warehouse.

If I’m a specialist in sound for a movie production, I’ll need creative people and I’ll need people that understand new media technology. I’ll need a hip urban location probably but other than that, I can pretty much put my new venture anywhere.

If I do I-Phone application development and games development, my primary business factor isn’t proximity to the CBD. I don’t need to have thousands of people pass my shop window each day to see my goods.

So if I’m in digital media, what is important to me? People - the right type of people with entrepreneurial spirit and original talent; that’s the key. A favourable tax regime and governmental support environment is probably equally important to me. But what about digital infrastructure? How important is that to my digital media business?

Unless my business is actually focused on digital infrastructure itself (and very few are), then the quality of digital infrastructure, or lack of appropriate digital infrastructure won’t be the single biggest factor. By itself, it won’t determine whether we can develop a digital economy and a digital media sector in Northern Ireland. But digital infrastructure really does matter to businesses in those digital economy sectors.

For example, we work with a highly successful animation company located in Belfast. They were there and they were successful before the recent developments in digital infrastructure arrived. But with this infrastructure they can be better, more successful. By allowing ultra-fast, direct transmission to the States our client can get their content submitted to their commissioning TV company faster. A whole day faster. And that means either another day of production time each week to make those cartoons even better (happier customer); or less stress on delivery day (happier supplier).

Would MTV have come to Belfast for the EMAs if top class digital infrastructure wasn’t already in place at the Odyssey Arena? Yes. But the MTV Networks were really impressed with what we can do here in Northern Ireland – way ahead of larger cities. So the good folks of MTV and their associated circles will leave Belfast feeling we’re that little bit ahead of other places, which helped them transmit those huge digital broadcast streams. We want opinion formers to know Belfast is digitally advanced. And digital media companies don’t come much bigger than MTV.

The honey-pot effect is crucial. Clearly Dublin has made an uncatchable head start in attracting and retaining the ‘big ICT’ companies, mainly due to their friendly tax situation and their superb Data Centre scene. Amazon, Microsoft and Google all have their feet firmly planted in Dublin. But this city has nothing to offer the world that Northern Ireland doesn’t already have, in terms of digital infrastructure and digital media sector. We should see this as an exciting challenge.

In Northern Ireland we’re offering digital infrastructure in a way that simply isn’t on offer elsewhere in the UK and Ireland. It’s available to companies large and small. We’re delighted to get the positive feedback on our digital infrastructure from digital media businesses considering locating in the province. We’re able to do this partly due to the kind, smallish geography and partly because through forums like DNI20/20, we see the opportunity and we see the need to plain old ‘get going’. In Northern Ireland, we’re investing with confidence in the digital media market provision.

Top-class digital infrastructure is rarely the ‘pull’ in locating in a certain region or city. But it’s a very important factor to those in new media - a critical box that we can tick and that other places can’t. More importantly we’re talking the right language to digital media companies, that we understand their needs, that we’re serious, that we’re keen to have this business develop in our part of the world.

We want to develop a digital media sector here in Northern Ireland. And it’s that critical mass, that ‘scene’ that we’re starting to see in Northern Ireland now. That isn’t down to our digital infrastructure. But that infrastructure matters to companies in the digital media industry, and it is vital in ensuring the digital media sector successfully grows here.

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