Over the last decade, the creative industries have been revolutionised by the Internet and the digital economy. The UK, already punching above its weight in the global cultural market, stands at a pivotal moment where it is well placed to build a cultural, business and regulatory infrastructure in which first movers as significant as Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes may emerge and flourish, driving new jobs and industry. However, for some creators and rightsholders the transition from analogue to digital has been as problematic as it has been promising. Cultural heritage institutions are also struggling to capitalise upon new revenue streams that digitisation appears to offer, while maintaining their traditional roles. Policymakers are hampered by a lack of consensus across stakeholders and confused by partisan evidence lacking robust foundations. Research in conjunction with industry is needed to address these problems and provide support for legislators. CREATe will tackle this regulatory and business crisis, helping the UK creative industry and arts sectors survive, grow and become global innovation pioneers, with an ambitious programme of research delivered by an interdisciplinary team (law, business, economics, technology, psychology and cultural analysis) across 7 universities. CREATe aims to act as an honest broker, using open and transparent methods throughout to provide robust evidence for policymakers and legislators which can benefit all stakeholders. CREATe will do this by: - focussing on studying and collaborating with SMEs and individual creators as the incubators of innovation; - identifying "good, bad and emergent business models": which business models can survive the transition to the digital?, which cannot?, and which new models can succeed and scale to drive growth and jobs in the creative economy, as well as supporting the public sector in times of recession?; - examining empirically how far copyright in its current form really does incentivise or reward creative work, especially at the SME/micro level, as well as how far innovation may come from "open" business models and the "informal economy"; - monitoring copyright reform initiatives in Europe, at WIPO and other international fora to assess how they impact on the UK and on our work; - using technology as a solution not a problem: by creating pioneering platforms and tools to aid creators and users, using open standards and released under open licences; - examining how to increase and derive revenues from the user contribution to the creative economy in an era of social media, mash-up, data mining and "prosumers"; - assessing the role of online intermediaries such as ISPs, social networks and mobile operators to see if they encourage or discourage the production and distribution of cultural goods, and what role they should play in enforcing copyright. Given the important governing role of these bodies should they be subject to regulation like public bodies, and if so, how?; - consider throughout this work how the public interest and human rights, such as freedom of expression, privacy, and access to knowledge for the socially or physically excluded, may be affected either positively or negatively by new business models and new ways to enforce copyright. To investigate these issues our work will be arranged into seven themes: SMEs and good, bad and emergent business models; Open business models; Regulation and enforcement; Creators and creative practice; Online intermediaries and physical and virtual platforms; User creation, behaviour and norms; and, Human rights and the public interest. Our deliverables across these themes will be drawn together to inform a Research Blueprint for the UK Creative Economy to be launched in October 2016.

It is currently a very exciting and challenging time for video compression. The predicted growth in demand for bandwidth, especially for mobile services is driven largely by video applications and is probably greater now than it has ever been. There are four reasons for this: (i) Recently introduced formats such as 3D and multiview, coupled with increasing dynamic range, spatial resolution and framerate, all require increased bit-rate to deliver improved immersion; (ii) Video-based web traffic continues to grow and dominate the internet; (iii) User expectations coninue to drive flexibility and quality, with a move from linear to non-linear delivery; (iv) Finally the emergence of new services, in particular mobile delivery through 4G/LTE to smart phones. While advances in network and physical layer technologies will no doubt contribute to the solution, the role of video compression is also of key importance. This research project is underpinned by the assumption that, in most cases, the target of video compression is to provide good subjective quality rather than to minimise the error between the original and coded pictures. It is thus possible to conceive of a compression scheme where an analysis/synthesis framework replaces the conventional energy minimisation approach. Such a scheme could offer substantially lower bitrates through reduced residual and motion vector coding. The approach proposed will model scene content using combinations of waveform coding and texture replacement, using computer graphic models to replace target textures at the decoder. These not only offer the potential for dramatic improvements in performance, but they also provide an inherent content-related parameterisation which will be of use in classification and detection tasks as well as facilitating integration with CGI. This has the potential to create a new content-driven framework for video compression. In this context our aim is to shift the video coding paradigm from rate-distortion optimisation to rate-quality modelling, where region-based parameters are combined with perceptual quality metrics to inform and drive the coding and synthesis processes. However it is clear that a huge amount of research needs to be done in order to fully exploit the method's potential and to yield stable and efficient solutions. For example, mean square error is no longer a valid objective function or measure of quality, and new embedded perceptually driven quality metrics are essential. The choice of texture analysis and synthesis models are also important, as is the exploitation of long-term picture dependencies.

The UK and global research and development communities have made tremendous strides in electronic device prototyping. Platforms that support conventional electronics have become well established, and the emerging potential of printed electronics and related additive technologies is clear. Together these support fast and versatile prototyping of the form and function of digital devices that underpin novel interactive data-driven experiences, including the Internet of Things (IoT), wearable technologies and more. However, challenges remain to realise their full potential. Interactive devices prototyped in labs and makerspaces implement novel capabilities and materials which require holistic manufacturing capability beyond simulation of conventional electronics. Even for conventional bench designs, to make the transition from prototype to product they need to be suitably robust, safe, long-lived, performant and cost-effective to deliver value as products - whether as a series of one-off mass customised devices, low-volume batches, or mass-produced artefacts. Unfortunately, the transition from prototype to production is not a natural one for end users; many ideas with potential don't progress beyond the first few designs. Democratising access to device production is the key next step in underpinning scalability and entrepreneurship in digital systems. We propose a Network+ of universities, research organisations and commercial enterprises who share the common goal of improving the transition from prototyping to production of digital devices. The Pro2 community will build upon the design and fabrication expertise of its researchers and practitioners to facilitate a deep synthesis of established principles, techniques and technologies and develop new concepts that span computer science, engineering and manufacturing. We will complement the on-going global investment into a variety of 'digital manufacturing' topics - including the UK's Made Smarter initiative - by tackling the challenge of progressively and cost-effectively transitioning from unconventional and single digital device prototypes, through tens of copies that can verify a design and validate utility, to batch production of hundreds to thousands of units. In prototyping, as additive manufacture and printed electronics converge further, in unconventional fields such as soft robotics and 4D printing, we need to identify how to integrate and optimise tools into workflows that support digital behaviour across materials, scales and functionalities. In production, smoothing the path from one-off microcontroller prototypes to scale-up is a significant challenge, and requires new processes and tools as well as reconfiguration of business models and services. Our vision for 'organic scaling' from prototype to production will allow faster exploration and exploitation of these digital device concepts and applications. This will accelerate the adoption of IoT, the growth of new consumer electronics markets, and more generally underpin the data-driven digital transformation of many industries. It will enable new research directions, create new business opportunities and drive economic growth.

The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster [(B+B)XR+D] is a new partnership designed to improve the performance of the Creative Industries in the Bristol & Bath region. The partners are UWE, Bristol, Watershed, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Bath Spa, working with a range of industry partners from Television, Theatre, and Computing. The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster will support its business partners in finding new ways to engage the audiences of the future in new market places. Our R&D-led productions will lead the cluster into the future, engaging with emergent technologies, boosting inward investment and developing a new talent base to lead the cluster's creative industries in the next ten years. Our core proposition is partnering with industry in understanding user engagement in new platforms. Next generation content delivery methods must preserve the immersive properties of content as perceived by humans when transmitted over bandlimited networks. We will mobilise the cluster research base to support businesses in improving their performance through projects that exploit the new relationships between content type, acquisition format, format parameters, coding artefacts, user environment and engagement.The (B+B)XR+D programme is designed to offer many points of contact and collaboration for industry partners that will produce several different kinds of impact for a range of different service users, participants, companies and individuals. Our goal is to lay the foundations for the Bristol + Bath cluster to be internationally successful by 2030.

Digital technology is everywhere, from the cinema to the living room, from the classroom to the shopping precinct. Our children have digital phones with cameras attached, and iPods that can store their school calendars so that they can listen to their music, anywhere, anytime whilst finishing their homework. Shopping precincts and underground stations, airport lounges and urinals all now carry methods of display to bring the digital world home to us - wherever we are. These technologies are now central to how we live our lives.\n\nLarge media corporations, whose success depends on introducing new commodities into the world, have begun unveiling a new range of high resolution equipment which is the vanguard of much higher levels of resolution. This current technology has fundamentally four to five times the resolution of preceding broadcast technology which means that a viewer can no longer see the line structure inherent in the video image when projected on a cinema screen. This apparently simple, and apparently inevitable, technological development makes the gold standard of feature film production / 35mm film / far more widely available than ever before. It also brings in its wake image resolution which is finer than the eye can perceive. Thus the context and the nature of moving image making has the potential to change fundamentally. \n\nWe are already witnessing the beginnings of a sea change in the nature of film production on one hand but also the beginnings of the change of domestic production in which more and more people are enabled to produce and circulate very high quality images.\n\nThe aim of this two year project is to transfer the practices and theories researched by Terry Flaxton, previously a professional cinematographer, in his completing three year Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellowship in high resolution imaging at Bristol University, to the image making sectors of the South West of England.\n\nThis project will encompass a series of strategies to transfer this knowledge, using conferences, workshops, surgeries, articles and also with visits with young film-makers of the region to centres of excellence of image capture and data processing.\n\n\n