Elisabeth Murdoch officially opened the MipTV market on Monday evening in a keynote address that sang the praises of 'creativity without borders.'

The media scion, who runs the UK's Shine Group, spoke of her background as a struggling buyer at the conference straight through to her days as a producer and to this year as a full-fledged distributor.

Murdoch has been in the TV business for the past 15 years and charmed a packed house of industry professionals with her belief in the 'authority and value' of content.

As the industry faces a recession, Murdoch said, 'We have downward pressure on budgets right when the audience is seeking higher production values on television.

'We are facing network marketing cuts exactly when it has never been harder to cut through a cacophonous marketing clutter. And we are facing an advertising squeeze when we need to find closer ways to work with advertisers on more experimental partnerships on all platforms.'

But, to all of this, she intoned, 'Bring it on.'

Shine recently acquired NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios co-chairman Ben Silverman's Reveille which has had great success adapting foreign formats for the US audience including The Office and Ugly Betty . The group currently produces 650 hours of programming per year.

Murdoch, who made only a passing reference to her media baron father, also spoke of finding new material from myriad sources.

'I absolutely believe that great creative ideas can come from every platform - it is short-sighted to only view such cross-platform projects as spin-offs or marketing extensions of television product.'

Continuing on the theme of creativity's importance, Murdoch, in part, concluded her talk saying, 'I am a firm believer that all ambitious, young, creative people from all over the world should come here early in their careers for inspiration and education I would also request that we see more creative leaders addressing us as an industry.

'Not just for our sake but for their own. I am amazed at how few US creative executives attend this market and I know that we could teach them a thing or two. Well, we will anyway, but they might like to see it coming.'

During a question and answer period following the speech, Murdoch said her outfit was still looking at acquiring other companies and also spoke to the issue of making TV shows available on the Internet. 'I don't think (consumers) will be willing to pay for it.' Rather, she said she felt the ad-supported model will be the way to go.

Regarding making content available on mobile devices, she demurred, 'The most difficult thing on mobile for producers is how you get paid.'

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