The UK’s TV industry is so envious of attention being grabbed by technology start-ups in east London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, it is carving out its own zone of the city.
The so-called “TV Triangle” “counter-balances the much-vaunted and invested-in east of the city where the Silicon Roundabout and Tech City reside”, writes Tess Alps of TV advertising lobby umbrella ThinkBox.
The initiative’s backer, a media advisory called Decipher, plots almost 60 outfits in broadcasting and online TV on its TV Triangle map.
But, unlike the compact, emerging technology area around Shoreditch, east London — which is attracting government funding and budding hipster-entrepreneurs like bees to a honey pot — “TV Triangle” covers a whole swathe of west London measuring perhaps around 35 square kilometers.
What’s more, the zone doesn’t just include broadcast firms but also liberally claims food etailers like Graze, PR agencies like Bite and furniture firms like Made.com.
In these converging times, it is more typical that technologists and media firms should rub shoulders and mingle. What now appears to be happening is a demarcation of particular locations as thematic business zones.
This may divide two cultures that should really be meeting more often, or it may simply point to increasing maturity around the concerted development initiatives of each.
Sounds to me, at least, like one of those sectors has a touch of the green-eyed monster…
“It is right for the government to invest time and money in the east and the ‘new media’ companies developing there,” Thinkbox’s Alps writes.
“But there should be equal energy put into other media that are at least as valuable and ripe for growth. The east does not have a monopoly on ‘new’”.