Barcelona Media is a centre for advanced technology dedicated to applied research and the transfer of knowledge and technology as a means to boost the competitiveness of the media and communications sector.

Barcelona Media is a non-profit foundation whose Board of Trustees is made up of representatives from universities, public administrations and companies from the communications sector.

Barcelona Media’s activities encompass four key areas:

• Promoting and implementing R&D+I projects. Barcelona Media helps its clients determine their strategic needs and identify the research, development and innovation projects that will help them become more competitive and achieve an ambitious return in a reasonable amount of time.
• Fostering collaborative R&D+I projects. Barcelona Media is a neutral partner that helps its clients throughout the entire process of preparing proposals and implementing publicly funded collaborative R&D&I projects. Since the beginning, Barcelona Media has fostered the forming of strong consortia between international organisations and companies that have shared objectives and ambitions.
• Acting as a bridge between academic and industrial research. Barcelona Media enables its clients to access the most cutting-edge technology in the field of communications and helps them use it to meet their specific needs.
• Innovating. Barcelona Media adds innovation to companies that are developing new products and services and helps set up more efficient production processes. It achieves this through the efforts of its three specialist-service laboratories.

Barcelona Media’s integrated quality and environmental management system has obtained international ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification.

The Media Sector

Barcelona Media concentrates its activities on the communications industry, also known as the media, content and audiovisual-production industry. This encompasses all the activities involving the production, distribution and use of content, in any medium and in any format. The advanced made by Barcelona Media in the field of communications can be applied in many sectors, such as health and safety, the automotive industry, medicine and mobility.

To gain an understanding of the size of the sector, Barcelona Media takes as its guide the definition established in 2009 for statistical purposes by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in order to characterise the following industries:

• Information and Communications Technology (ICT): combining activities such as ICT manufacturing and services, commerce, IT activities (including video-game editing and publishing) and telecommunications.
• Audiovisual content and services: combining activities such as the publishing of books and other products, activities related to film, video and television (production, post-production, distribution and screening), sound-recording and music-editing activities, programming and broadcasting for radio and television and other information services.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (2011*), income from the telecommunications, IT and content sector accounts for 9.8% of Spain’s GDP. In 2010 overall turnover for the sector was 104.3 billion euros, of which the telecommunications industry was responsible for 38% and the IT and content industry, 62%..

Some key statistics:

• Spain is home to almost 27,000 companies in the ICT and content industry, which together employ more than 381,000 people.
• Turnover for the ICT and content industry exceeded 64.5 billion euros in 2010.
• Companies in the ICT and content industry invested more than 11.5 billion euros during 2010.
• 24% of companies in the ICT and contents industry have their headquarters in Catalonia.

Within this context, Barcelona Media is the coordinator of the Barcelona Media Cluster of innovative companies, which was the brainchild of Barcelona Media and was set up with the support of the Ministry for Industry, Tourism and Trade in order to strengthen the potential for innovation and competitiveness of the companies making up the cluster. The Barcelona Media Cluster adopts a leading role in “energisation” activities to enable the implementation of collaborative projects in specific sectors and fields at the regional, national and international level.