My sense is that Singapore treats the creator economy as industrial policy and wants Singapore-owned IP that can be sold to the world in return for its money. Whether it gets it will only become clear with the first titles from the new state programme. I have lived in different countries and different systems. From 9 October I am in Singapore for a week, and I want to see how this system looks up close, among the people who come up with, write and shoot the stories.
At the opening of the Singapore trade fair Asia TV Forum & Market, Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information, announced the Talent Accelerator Programme on 3 December 2025, TAP for short. The government will put SGD 200 million into it over three years.
In his opening speech at the fair, the minister described the aim of the programme as “to help our talent develop stories with global ambition from the very start”. The programme is run by the agency IMDA. The money pays for development, production and distribution, and co-finances regional and global co-productions of films and series, both scripted and unscripted. The agency wants the sector to focus more on global distribution and on developing genre IP. It is setting up its own marketing team for titles carrying the Made-with-Singapore label.
In the Czech Republic, films are funded by the State Fund for Audiovisual Industry (Státní fond audiovize), which since 2025 also covers series and video games. This year, on 27 March, the fund stopped accepting applications for film incentives because the money set aside for this year had run out. It reopened them on 1 September.
The Czech audiovisual act excludes video recordings, music videos and programmes based on them from support, as well as entertainment and current-affairs programmes. An incentive can only be granted for a work that will be made available on television, on an on-demand service or in cinemas. A feature film must be at least 60 minutes long and cost at least CZK 18 million. Under the law, the fund therefore cannot give money to videos that creators upload to YouTube or TikTok, because the platform act counts such videos as user-generated video recordings.
The Czech state registers creators on social networks with the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting. Since May 2025 the council has been looking for them itself and enters in the register anyone whose service by its nature and reach competes with television broadcasting. That person is then subject to the obligations of an on-demand audiovisual media service provider.
Money for content sits next to money for AI
In June 2026, IMDA launched the DCCD programme worth SGD 48 million. It is aimed at local media companies and pays for short episodic formats and AI-generated content. The programme is meant to reach mainly audiences in Singapore. The export ambition is carried by TAP. DCCD also includes the micro-drama programme that IMDA launched with TikTok.
Tan Kiat How called the sum a reasonable start. If the results are good, the government is ready to add more. In the same speech he said that AI shortens the creative cycle, lowers barriers to entry and lets digital creators and individuals into the market. Among the 55 AI courses that IMDA has selected for media professionals is a course on shooting short videos with AI for TikTok, Reels and Shorts.
“The cost of execution is going down. The cost of coordination is not,” I wrote in March.
In my view, Singapore handles coordination by having the agency that distributes money for content also help attract AI companies. IMDA forms, together with the agencies EDB and Enterprise Singapore, a joint office called Digital Industry Singapore. It pushes companies in Singapore to set up AI centres. More than sixty firms, including Google and Microsoft, have already set up an AI centre there. Between 2025 and 2030 the government is putting more than SGD 1 billion into public AI research.
The Czech National AI Strategy 2030 mentions the creative industries only once, as one of seven areas of the CzechInvest incubation programme. The European joint undertaking EuroHPC is providing half of the money for the AI factory in Ostrava. The factory targets industry, healthcare, energy, public administration, cybersecurity and mobility. In the strategy and in the Ostrava factory, money for AI and money for content have probably not yet met.
Only a Singapore company may apply for content money
Only a company registered in Singapore may apply for the TAP film grant. A European producer can get to the money only as a co-producer alongside such a company, and a global co-production must employ at least forty Singapore media professionals, twelve of them in directing, producing and screenwriting. AI centres, by contrast, must cover multiple markets, and the state uses them to attract global technology firms.
“Nobody builds anything meaningful alone,” I wrote last December. Singapore has turned that sentence into a budget line.
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