Digital Britain report - the impact on our industry

PR, marketing and digital comms professionals will all feel the effect of the Digital Britain report that was released this afternoon, in various ways (like back to school... have a read!). If you've not caught up on the key elements of the paper, at 195 pages long, media sources have done a great job of distilling the key points. The FT, BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and PaidContent are worth reading, and here are some issues that have been highlighted.

• All of the UK will have broadband of 2mbps by 2012, this will be paid for in part by the public. This date will be a deadline for a switch-off of 'analogue' government services
• All radio to be digital by 2015
• Martha Lane Fox is the new 'Digital Champion'
• A harder line on digital piracy
• A £120 million investment in a Digital Economy Programme
• Professionals in the digital and creative sectors to give school ICT training in a new pilot scheme

So what does it mean for our industry? Here's a starter for 10

• We'll be teaching digital to school kids (but they'll teach us a thing or two surely?)
• We'll see increasing drive in PR for digital services from all aspects of day to day live, be it government or private sector, which will be thrust into the same place digital TV has been recently
• More digital radio technology on the market, and a long tail of radio broadcasters emerging
• More investment will mean more R&D, jobs and innovations in digital, even for the relatively small sum of £120m

It's early days.  While I think of more on this topic I will update this post.

Ged Caroll has posted on PR Week's blog about this, but I'm not sure his conclusion that mobile dongles in lieu of 2mb broadband would work. Especially the brand he's mentioned. No signal for that where I live, for the record :)

Comments

[Ged]

Ahh so its you AND my mother that reads it then Drew ^_^. Glad to see that I've doubled my readership.

I had my tongue in cheek a bit with the dongle comment, but the point I was making was that 2MB isn't really the forefront of the digital economy.

Especially when you think about Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries would find it laughable at the present time. I was really disappointed at the lack of imagination that went into the report. C'est la vie.

[Mark Pack]

Ged: I read it too, and to the best of my knowledge I'm not your mother, so looks like you've got another reader :)

What strikes me about the 2Mb figure is that it might become a target which those pitching for public services are expected to meet. If your service requires more than 2Mb to work well, then chances are you'll score badly on any criteria involving reducing social exclusion.