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EU Parliament votes to fund eContent
By Simon Taylor

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have voted to grant €149 million (US$194.25 million) over the next three years to develop digital content across the European Union (E.U.).

At the Parliament's plenary session on Thursday, MEPs voted for the E.U.'s eContentplus program, which supports development of multilingual content for on-line services.

"The Internet offers a unique opportunity for content companies to outgrow their so far mostly national markets," said European Information Society Commissioner Vivian Reding, commenting on the vote. She added that the program would help "preserve and share Europe's cultural and linguistic identities and give them a more prominent place on the Internet."

The eContentplus program aims to tackle the "fragmentation" of the European digital content market and address the areas where market forces have been insufficient to drive growth. Its main focus is on three areas: spatial or geographical data, education material and cultural content.

One of the aims is to tackle the problem of fragmentation in the geographical data sector, where different countries collect and store information such as coordinates, postcodes, planning and land registration details in different ways. The program is designed to help the creation of E.U. information services from such data to be used in areas such as transportation, navigation, emergency response and environmental management.

The final budget for the program was slightly higher than the €135 million proposed by the European Commission, the E.U.'s executive branch.

Now that the Parliament has voted, the package will be formally adopted in the coming weeks by the Council of Ministers, made up of national governments.

Posted January 28, 2005 07:15 PM |