Businesses can apply for a share of £4 million for projects to meet the challenges of producing creative content across devices and media.

Innovate UK is to invest up to £4 million in innovative business projects that help to build on the UK’s strengths in film, television, animation, video games, interactive media and visual effects.

The UK’s audio-visual sector employs 250,000 people and adds more than £8 billion to the economy. In 2013, UK films earned £2.7 billion globally, domestic film production was worth £1 billion and exports of UK television programmes were worth £1.2 billion.

UK businesses must keep innovating to maintain a world-leading position in an increasingly competitive media sector.

This funding competition aims to stimulate new products and services that address the technical challenges of producing content across a range of devices and media.

Successful projects could develop applications that:

• improve content creation in real time across different platforms and media
• enable integration of pre-production, production and post-production processes
• improve the management of a complex mix of digital assets and metadata
• allow producers or consumers to interact with content
• improve the efficiency of content production

Competition information

• this competition opens on 9 November 2015, and the deadline for registration is noon on 23 December 2015
• projects must be led by a business working with at least one partner
• we expect projects to range in size from total costs of £300,000 to £750,000 and to last 9 to 18 months
• small businesses could receive up to 70% of their eligible project costs, medium-sized businesses 60% and large businesses 50%
• a briefing event for potential applicants will be held in London on 11 November 2015