The high profile Aviemore Broadband Conference, organised by the Department of Trade & Industry and drawing attendees from all corners of Britain, turned into a ringing endorsement of the creative industries in the Highlands & Islands. In the opening ceremony and the introductory keynote, Chief Executive of Highlands & Islands Enterprise Sandy Cummings, the Deputy First Minister for Scotland Jim Wallace and the American Governor of Maine John Baldacci all made the creative industries either the focus or a prominent component of their speeches. aimhi and the music group, Highlands & Islands Record Labels were singled out in the speeches and used as examples of organisations catalysing the conceptualisation and development for international broadband content.

Subsequent keynote speakers then hit home the point that broadband content would be a key growth sector in the coming decade, and that this is a sector which established media businesses have inadequately capitalised upon. A report by the European Commission also predicted that growth in the technology side would be significantly outstripped by content as the volume of media material catches up with the platform upon which it is served. A simple parallel can be drawn between to the development of the Internet. In the earliest days of the world wide web in the 1980s, there were only a handful of websites around the world. Today, there are literally tens if not hundreds of millions of websites around the world. There is typically a significant lag between the invention of a technology platform and the development of the technology specific platform to go with it, and it turned out to be a great business opportunity for those able to exploit this lag.

We are seeing the same thing for web-based content today. Some obscure micro-company dabbling in web content today will be tomorrow's trendy new media giant.