The audience is the essential starting point for discussion of a cross-media world. A demand-led consumer culture is among the main factors that have undermined existing industry business models. From piracy to release windows, the creative industries have tried to work out ways to hold back the tide of demand. The cross-media world, however, is about working with customer trends rather than restricting them. Specifically, the mcp  panel questioned the future of a system in which value resides in the selling of rights to a restricted territory and for a single platform. The rethinking of value as something that is based on relationships with audience will be explored later in these Think Tank reports. The idea that the point of interaction with content should be the choice of customer is contentious. In film, for example, it denies the almost religious centrality of the theatrical window. In fact, most of the participants are confident that cinema has a future but that its value will be based on its social setting which, far from needing protection, gives it a unique position if it can offer customers choice, an experience, comfort etc. But at heart, the microsoft certification cross-media argument is that audiences ultimately decide the hierarchy of platforms. The music industry learned the hard way, that where and when product is used was simply not in their gift, and business models based on restriction suffered. The engaged audience Consumer control in cross-media terms takes that power to new levels. Audiences will decide at what level their engagement takes place but their centrality is crucial – in an internet age, audiences become communities. “Every project creates its own federated group of people,” says Michel Reilhac, Executive Director, Arte France Cinéma. “Audience can invent itself.” The active audience is not then necessarily one that takes a direct part in the financing or creation of content, even though crowd-sourcing has taken the headlines.As Sara Pollack, Entertainment Marketing Manager at YouTube rightly pointed out, the large microsoft certifications majority may be happy as consumers. But the notion of the “engaged audience” can be defined widely. In the modern media, audiences choose what they see, whose recommendations they follow, on what platform they wish to see content. A number of people pointed out that the very fact that audiences assemble socially online and make up communities that can be understood, mobilised and serviced, represents a sea change from the analogue age.