Bigger Picture Research

Guest post: Russian film distribution market

In late 2009 I flagged up a report on the Russian film industry authored by Nevafilm Research and Rfilms on behalf of the European Audiovisual Observatory.

Nevafilm has recently launched a new, and more detailed, study of the Russian distribution market, available to purchase from their web site (in the interest of full disclousure: I'm not working on commission).

Here Xenia Leontyeva, Senior Analyst at Nevafilm Research, explains what the report covers and how it can benefit industry professionals with an eye on the Russian market:

In a recent blog post, Jim Barratt asked what market players need to know about the film distribution market in the UK. Specialists at Nevafilm Research asked themselves the same question about the film distribution market in Russia last year.

We wondered: do many producers (in Russia and abroad) know what it takes to effectively sell their film on the Russian market? What fundamental knowledge will help them navigate Russia’s vast expanse? Let’s not forget that Russia, with a population of 141 million, boasts a truly massive market, spanning nine time zones and one-third of Eurasia.

Data collected by Nevafilm Research shows that the country has:

• More than 860 modern cinemas (about 2,430 screens, 930 of which are digital) in 330 cities, serving 76 million people. The film distribution market consists of 30 distribution companies and about 500 exhibitors;

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• Eighty two million Russians own DVD players. Six hundred thousand own Blu-ray players. One out of two residents of the country buys at least one licensed disc a year, though sales of pirated content remain four times higher. Still, Russia has 60 video distribution companies and more than 40 major video retail chains;

• 140.5 million residents whose homes are equipped for free terrestrial television. Terrestrial TV offers around 30,000 hours of programming a year—that’s 80 hours a day! Films are regularly shown on 20 national terrestrial TV channels, and popular film segments draw between 500,000 to 5 million viewers;

• 72 million non-terrestrial television subscribers. At least 30 cable and satellite television channels specialize in cinema, and are watched at least once per month by between 100,000 and 7 million viewers;

• 35 million people with broadband Internet access and 11 million cable, telecom, and satellite services subscribers with more than 30 paid or free VoD services to choose from.

Our new study, The Film Distribution Market in Russia, goes beyond simply collecting these numbers, and represents an effort to make sense of this diverse market and to help navigate its legislative and socio-economic peculiarities.

This report is no run-of-the-mill year-in-review: it’s a comprehensive collection of information you will need to know to make an educated decision about your film’s future in Russia. What type of film rights should you choose? To whom should you transfer these rights? And how much should you charge? The Film Distribution Market in Russia has the answers to all these questions.

The report will tell you, for example, the USD-RUB exchange rates for 1993, 1998, and 2008. By comparing national currency exchange rate fluctuations with the rate of inflation for the same period, you can see just how hard Russians were hit by the recent world financial crisis.

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The report will also give you an accurate picture of population dispersal across Russia’s seemingly endless territories.  You can see just how economically stratified Russia’s society really is and learn the actual effects of the demographic collapse of the 1990s.

We’ve also included detailed information about school breaks and holidays, and a list of more than 30 dates with special significance in Russians’ social life. You’ll learn the crucial differences between the New Year and “Old New Year”, Russia’s extensive winter and spring breaks, National Unity Day and the Day of Accord and Reconciliation.

We provide our own analysis of more than 20 laws regulating the audiovisual sector. We go beyond defining these laws, to describe limitations and preferential conditions placed on the sector’s players, as well as their responsibilities and privileges. We also analyze recent legislative changes and offer a sampling of professional opinions about these changes, selected from the current Russian press.

Finally, we are the only ones offering a definitive list of all major Russian film distribution market players, along with a description of each player. This list includes cinema chains; film, video, television, and Internet distribution companies; content aggregators; terrestrial and non-terrestrial television channels; video manufacturing facilities; retail chains; cable and IP television operators; websites offering VoD services, and more.

The report is written by Russian film industry specialists, based on first-hand data, so you can always be confident that the information is accurate and up-to-date. Since the report was translated into English by native English speakers, you won’t have to claw your way through every sentence.

Unfortunately, Jim was only too right to note in his blog that this kind of market information can’t be had for free. You can find out how to purchase this report at our website. However, we are always happy to talk to you about your personal needs and resources, and we can help significantly reduce your expenses by offering you specific chapters (in digital or print format). Please don’t hesitate to contact us at research@nevafilm.ru.

 

 

 

Xenia Leontyeva
Senior Analyst, Nevafilm Research
www.digitalcinema.ru

 

More on East Midlands investments

Last October I posted about the East Midlands Media Investments Fund (EMMI), as featured in EM Media's review of Economic Achievements 2008/09, which I was covering at the time.

Just last week EM Media and the East Midlands Development Agency announced a further round of EMMI investments, totalling over half a million pounds, including four feature films (The Brutal Game, Oranges and Sunshine, Tyrannosaur and The Weekender), a feature documentary (AnDa Union), TV development (Over the Hill and Under Cover), a documentary short (PS, Your Mystery Sender), a Facebook application (GangstaPets), and an online game (Natural Born Racer).

A tenth project will be announced shortly, and EM Media anticipates these investments will together deliver over 90 jobs, generating around £13 million for the East Midlands economy. This latest round of support brings EM Media's total to 37 feature films, 75 short films, 15 TV and 15 games and interactive investments to date.

Further information, including details of the talent involved in the funded projects, can be found on EM Media's web site.

2009: a year in rear view

So how was it for you? As 2010 gambols into view, like a newly minted foal, it seems only polite to ask.

For my part, I’ve been wondering these last few days whether 2009 was especially significant for the film business. It’s probably too early to say, and in any case every year is one of highs and lows, winners and losers. The one just past is no different.

On the strength of available evidence, it’s probably fair to say 2009 was not a singularly momentous year for the film biz. But it did bear witness to a number of watershed moments, and the question of its lasting significance will only be answerable in years to come.

We can say with certainty that theatrical exhibition in many parts of the world has fared well in 2009, further evidence that cinemagoing can be remarkably resilient even in the teeth of a recession (a point made in a paper published by the UK Film Council back in September 2008).

What role did 3D play in all of this? There’s an interesting study to be done to find out the answer (any takers?). 2009 saw the long-heralded relaunch of 3D courtesy of the digital cinema roll out across the globe, and the extra dimension gave movie theatres an added advantage over home entertainment (which makes it my Watershed Moment #1). It’s difficult to predict how long this advantage will last (3D TVs are in development, we’re told) and it remains to be seen whether the premium ticket prices charged to 3D goggle wearers will be sustainable once the novelty wears off.

While we’re on the subject of exhibition, I must mention the Splendor Cinema blog (my Find of the Year #1), which is dedicated to the exhibition business and written by Jon Barrenchea, General Manager of the Duke of York's Picturehouse in Brighton.

With cinema cash registers ringing fulsomely throughout 2009, there’s a certain irony in the fact that the year also saw more concerted experimentation with release windows by the major studios. Exhibitors have resisted any encroachment on the theatrical window, and the studios have contented themselves by playing around with various combinations of home entertainment windows, shuffling VoD and DVD releases on certain titles (Watershed Moment #2). But as trade journalist Diane Garrett reports in her Consumed by Media blog (Find of the Year #2), it may be only a matter of time before the theatrical window comes under renewed pressure.

Online piracy continued to loom large in 2009, despite the high-profile prosecution of Pirate Bay. But faced with dwindling finance from traditional sources and a theatrical market place dominated by expensively marketed studio pictures, independent filmmakers turned in increasing numbers to the digital sphere for production funding and DIY distribution opportunities.

To paraphrase Churchill, 2009 did not mark the end of old way of making and distributing films, and it was not even the beginning of the end. But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning (a Watershed Moment #3 of sorts; Mark Anderson, writing recently in Wired, certainly thinks so).

The global banking crisis, the explosion of social networking, audience fragmentation, digital media convergence, the rise of multi-platform story-telling, the profusion of free online content and rampant file sharing: individually and collectively they pose a challenge to the status quo, as well as untold opportunities for those less wedded to the Twentieth Century way of doing things.

So much for the bigger picture. Here’s a quick run down of my highlights from the year’s posts:

January, February and March
At the top of the year some video game suit claimed ‘video games are poised to eclipse all other forms of entertainment in the decade ahead’. According to figures published only last week, it looks like he might have a point, at least in revenue terms. But it’s patent nonsense to suggest this makes video games more popular than film, a line some hacks have been touting in recent days.

It’s not only this kind of spurious logic we need to guard against in media coverage of the film business. As LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein reminded us in January, feature film budget numbers quoted in the media should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Or in Avatar’s case, perhaps a good handful.

The start of the year also saw the launch of a House of Lords enquiry into the British film and TV industries. The Lords Communications Committee took written and oral evidence throughout most of 2009, but there’s still no sign of their final report. Let's hope it's worth the wait.

2009 was a pleasingly fertile year for film business research sources, with the launch of several new web sites including Film New Europe in March, followed in June by Movie Review Intelligence and Marqeestars.com in September (Finds of the Year #3, #4 and #5). Be sure to check them out, if you’ve not done so already.

April, May and June
As previously noted, in 2009 it seemed we were never very far away from a piracy-related story, and in May an independent study by an academic research institute claimed to have established the size and impact of film and music piracy in the UK. Problem was the original press release included a wildly inaccurate figure, as pointed out by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian’s ‘Bad Science’ column. But that didn’t stop The Daily Mail, and others, running with the story.

In terms of the number of page views, by far the year’s most popular post concerned publication by the UK Film Council of Peter Bloore’s paper re-evaluating the independent film value chain (Find of the Year #6).

And around this time the UK Film Council also published a report into the cultural impact of UK film during the period 1946 to 2006 (the report can be downloaded as a PDF here) (a seminar was held to discuss the findings in November- presentations can be found on the UK Film Council web site).

July, August and September
July began encouragingly enough with publication by a couple of US academics of a paper about the use of film data to teach students basic business statistics.

But the big news in this period, certainly from a UK perspective, was of the proposed merger between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute. I posted my initial thoughts on hearing the news, and was rewarded with an honourable mention in a Sight and Sound editorial. I duly renewed my subscription.

Critic and film writer Jason Solomons tried to kick off a debate about British films with his verdict that most of them are ‘crap’ (in a feature article for The Observer). Such is the lacklustre state of public discourse about film culture in this country that the article sparked nary a whimper in response. Did all of Solomons's readers simply shrug in resigned agreement? Where were the dissenting voices? Maybe he has has a point, after all.

October, November and December
Autumn greeted a new study of the European video on demand market, published by the European Audiovisual Observatory. The Observatory came up trumps again later in the year with publication of a detailed report into the Russian film business, prepared by Nevafilm and Rfilms (my Find of the Year #7)

A little late in the year, perhaps, for a silly season story, but news broke in November of a study estimating Kate Winslet’s financial value to the UK economy. We learned the actress is worth roughly £60 million to UK plc. If push comes to shove and the recession bites any deeper, I wonder how much we’d get for her on Ebay?

Better late than never, in December I finally found time to write up details of my favourite film-related infographics, an area of endeavour I plan to return to again in the coming year. There are many talented and generous people producing and freely sharing these fine works, and collectively they make my Find of the Year #8.

So there you have it, 2009 done and dusted. I look forward to welcoming you back in 2010.

The future of home entertainment

The future of home entertainment has come under renewed speculation recently, with a flurry of conference reports and trade press coverage replete with hard data. Commentators point out we’re in a long period of transition as consumers move from transactions involving packaged media (DVD and Blu-ray) to the consumption of unboxed, digital product across a variety of platforms.

This is far from a straightforward transition because those punters with broadband connected devices in the home generally want video content on demand and for free.

Under prevailing business models this puts pressure on release windows and revenues, a pressure emanating from technological and social change rather than business imperative. 'We're in an accelerated period where technology and the consumer is outpacing the studios' current business model,' Mike Kelley, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told Alex Dobuzinskis writing for Reuters.

The attraction of unboxed content for studios is plain enough: Dobuzinskis cites higher margins and ‘the ability to collect and use information about customers’. The sticking point is one of scale: revenues from online video are projected to hit a $753 million in the North American market by 2013, according to figures quoted by Dobuzinskis. But that’s still only equivalent in size to 5% of the US DVD market circa 2008.

Truth is, there’s burgeoning demand for online video content but consumers are hitting the ‘free’ stuff in massive numbers rather than opting for paid-for product. David Mercer of Strategy Analytics, writing recently in DVD Intelligence, provides evidence of the popularity of ‘free’ online content services. The US-based Hulu.com, second only to YouTube in the free download sector, hosted 373 million streams in April 2009 according to Nielsen data. That compares with 260 million units of TV shows, movies and other video content sold worldwide for digital download in 2008, according to Strategy Analytics’s own data.

More recent data published in World Screen reveal the scale of YouTube’s dominance, with a staggering 10 billion video viewings in August alone according comScore data. From the same source: more than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer during the month of August, and 82% of US Internet users watched online video last month, with the average viewer watching 9.7 hours online. The words voracious and appetite spring to mind.

But as Mercer goes on to make clear in DVD Intelligence, ‘successful business models for online video have still not been defined. Content owners and distributors are still experimenting with the appropriate mix of paid-for and advertising models.’ Consumer demand for ‘free’ content would seem to favour an advertising-based model, but this has yet to deliver significant enough revenues to satisfy most rights holders.

Jason Kramer, of research outfit Interpret, told delegates at last month’s Digital Media Pipeline conference in Los Angeles (laid on by the Entertainment Merchants Association) that nearly half (49%) of US consumers watched at least an hour a week of online video in the first quarter of 2009, compared with 32% who said the same during the first three months of 2008- further evidence that online video’s star is rising. But as previously noted, the majority of this viewing activity is directed at ad-supported free streaming sites (YouTube, Hulu etc.). ‘The studios are not really set up for ad-supported models,’ concludes Kramer. ‘There needs to be a new model’.

The experimentation David Mercer mentions is highly tentative at this stage. Put simply, the biggest players are fearful of cannibalising their existing business. Take the example of Warner Bros., who last month became the first major studio to release films on VoD before DVD with the home entertainment premiere of Observe and Report and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past via cable-operator Comcast, days before the titles were released as packaged media. This small but significant step was taken in an effort to ‘boost revenue on VoD (for which the studio gets a bigger cut of rental revenue than with DVD) without hurting DVD sales’, according to a piece in Video Business.

Understandably the studios wish to protect the DVD cash cow (and it’s hormone injected successor Blu-ray), or at least delay its demise until something lucrative enough is found to replace it. So the key question remains to what extent is unboxed content (whether free or paid-for) cannibalising legitimate packaged media transactions? It’s hard to say for certain on the basis of publicly available research, but Mercer reports findings from a survey of 3,500 people in the US and Europe that throws some light on the subject.

The research reveals that regular DVD users tend to be more active users of online video than the wider population of broadband internet users. For example, the number of broadband users claiming to download movies over the internet on a regular basis is relatively small (15% of the total) but the proportion of DVD users downloading movies is nearly twice the population average.

‘We can’t draw the conclusion that usage of DVDs will inevitably fall directly as a result of the growing number of alternative sources of video content,’ writes Mercer. ‘[But] we would expect that DVD usage will come under increasing pressure as the quality of online video and the range of available content continue to improve’.

As rights holders naturally wish to maximise their returns across revenue streams, what are the likely future prospects of paid-for unboxed content? Apple’s iTunes service demonstrates a market exists for pay-as-you-go movies and TV shows, but – once again- revenues remain small in comparison with the overall packaged media market.

During a Spotlight Presentation at the Digital Media Pipeline conference, Arash Amel of Screen Digest put Apple’s iTunes share of web-based VoD at 52% of the market, followed by Xbox Live on 31%. Screen Digest values the global web-based VoD market at $500 million in 2009, rising to $2 billion in 2013 (to put this in some perspective, DEG valued the US – not the global- home entertainment market, including VoD, at $9.73 billion in 2009, the lion share of which is down to DVD).

A quick digression, while we’re on the subject of iTunes. Scott Kirsner, writing this week in Variety, points out that Gary Hustwit’s 'Helvetica’ has generated a six-figure sum from its showing on iTunes (priced at $9.99 per download). Impressive stuff for a documentary about typography, but, as Kirsner laments, it remains an uncommon case: ‘The indie download business is still having problems gaining traction. The power of the Internet was supposed to level the playing field on which independent filmmakers and studios compete for audiences. So what happened?’. Check out the article, and Kirsner’s follow up on the Cinematech blog (An update on the State of Indie Film Online), for further analysis and case studies.

Returning to the Screen Digest data, Xbox Live’s market share is noteworthy because games consoles with online capabilities are well placed to bring VoD content onto TV screens in the home, arguably posing a bigger challenge to packaged media than PC-based viewing alone. Jennifer Netherby, writing in Video Business, reports the Xbox 360 console is happily ensconced in 16 million US households (the Playstation 3 is in 8 million and Nintendo Wii is in 20 million homes), ‘making gaming consoles the leading internet-connected device already hooked up to TVs’.

In closing, here’s one final angle to consider: what’s in store for the size of the home entertainment market as a whole (as opposed to the relative market shares of VoD and DVD)?

'I don't think that studios are looking at online to save the home entertainment business,' Stephen Prough, founder of Salem Partners, told Alex Dobuzinskis. '[B]ut I think they want to avoid what happened to the music business and try to come up with alternative modes of distribution before physical media goes away.'

The Internet’s influence on film audiences (and studio executives)

In the last couple of days the trade press has reported a study produced by Stradella Road, a marketing company founded earlier this year by Gordon Paddison, former Head of New Media and Integrated Marketing at New Line Cinema.

Among other things, Paddison worked on the campaign for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, establishing a link with Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films which led in February 2009 to the signing of a multi-year deal to deliver digital brand strategy on all Wingnut entertainment products.

The study looks at the influence the Internet has over film audiences, a subject of obvious interest to Stradella Road in its efforts to build a client base. As Paddison noted at the time the deal was struck with Wingnut Films, ‘Social media has revolutionized the way consumers connect with each other and include brands in their life and Stradella Road is the place for clients looking to leverage and evolve with the medium.’ Anything that demonstrates the growing influence of new media is obvious grist to the mill.

That’s not meant in any way to undermine the research; but awareness of who’s behind the study, and whose interests are being served by its propagation, is instructive. Thus you may like to know the study was sponsored by AOL, Facebook, Fandango, Google, Microsoft, MovieTickets.com and Yahoo.

Anyway, the research, appearing in a report entitled ‘Moviegoers 2010’, was conducted by Nielsen NRG and involved a survey of 1,547 moderate-to-heavy moviegoers over an eight day period in July 2009, plus phone and online interviews with 2,305 others during the same month. Methodological details are sketchy, and as I haven’t seen a copy of the report I can’t offer any further background on the questions posed, the survey format or the sample.

Nonetheless, thanks to online sources not (yet) buried behind paywalls, we can glean details of the principal findings. For Marc Graser, writing in Variety, the study’s main message is that ‘if marketing mavens want to reach younger moviegoers when promoting their films, they need to embrace social networks or risk being ignored.’

Teens and ‘twentysomethings’, the demographic that so preoccupies studio executives, are, according to the research, ‘especially focused on being able to customize entertainment and are quick to share their opinions with others digitally’.

Graser reports the study’s estimate that 94% of all US moviegoers are now online, and 71% of moviegoers surveyed have profiles on social networking sites. But in broad brush terms, as the study shows and common sense dictates, use and influence are highly dependent on age:

• Those aged 13-17 are ‘all about sharing information and group thinking’, and social media are crucial to this (67% socialise with friends online).
• Those aged 18-29 ‘are digital natives that have grown up with technology’ who search online for movie information and share their thoughts via social networks (58% socialise with friends online).
• Those in their 30s are ‘time-constrained, with parenthood dominating their decisions’. They ‘spend the highest number of hours online and rep[ort] the highest use of technology (Internet, broadband access, DVR ownership and cell phone).’
• Meanwhile those in their 40s tend to favour traditional media ‘like magazines and newspapers’, and moviegoing is ‘dominated by special family occasions and influenced by teens’. Those in their 50s ‘avoid crowds, prefer matinees’ and ‘skip ads because they think there are too many commercials on TV.’

Covering the story for The Hollywood Reporter, Paul Bond reports additional data revealing that ‘73% of moviegoers -- those who attend movies at least twice a year -- first gain awareness of releases from TV commercials, followed by 70% from in-theater trailers. Word-of-mouth follows at 46%, and the Internet, at 44%, has passed such traditional methods as billboards and newspaper advertising.’

Bond notes the fact that ‘TV commercials remain such an effective way of spreading the word is good news for TV execs, especially given that 52% of moviegoers use DVRs. That's roughly 20 percentage points higher than the general population.’

But it’s the evolving nature of online behaviour that primarily interests Stradella Road. According to Bond, the study shows that ‘once they learn of a movie they'd like more information about, 93% go to the Internet, with 62% seeking an online film review.’ (I'm not clear which group we're talking about here- the figure seems too high for all ages).

Yet it’s not so much the Internet that influences audiences- the crucial role is played by those members of the peer group who choose to share their opinions online: 40% of respondents said ‘that negative reviews from typical moviegoers will keep them from seeing a movie, while only 28% say that a bad review from a critic will cause them to steer clear.’ (And as a further snub to professional critics, Marc Graser reports the finding that 84% of moviegoers say ‘When they make up their mind to see a movie, it doesn't matter what the critics say about it’).

I’ll leave the closing words to Paddison, as quoted by Daniel Frankel in The Wrap:

‘We talk all the time about how much the market is changing, but somehow, we stop short of dealing with the magnitude of that change. Perhaps it’s because we don’t know our market as well as we should.’

Enter Stradella Road, stage right.

>>>UPDATE 1 OCTOBER 2009>>>

Ben Fritz, covering the story for the LA Times, includes a chart and data table from Stradella Road providing additional detail about the study findings.

Piracy data mashup thingy

Last week I came across the guardian.co.uk’s Data Store for the first time (along with its companion Data Blog).  If you haven’t visited I can recommend it as a splendid use of the Scott Trust’s money. It’s free to you and me.

The idea is simple enough. Using web 2.0 technology, guardian.co.uk aims to make ‘important data more accessible to people’, by publishing facts and figures from publicly available data sources, and encouraging users to analyse, re-interpret and share the results. The site even invites you to mashup the data, which as far as I can tell is a bit like a fry up but with more potato and a lot less saturated fat.

Now if truth be told, I don’t have a statistical bone in my body (unless, of course, you count my digits). Nonetheless I find this a really exciting development. There’s even a Guardian Data Talk Group, ‘to discuss data, tools, formats, standards, how to use the data The Guardian publishes, where to get it, etc.’. Judging by the archive, the Group hasn’t seen that much activity since it came online in late February, but it’s good to know it’s there should the need ever arise. I’ll certainly be chipping in.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with the usual film-related themes of BPR posts, I only came across the Data Store by chance while chasing a link to Charles Arthur’s technology blog post about music piracy, in which he uses Data Store numbers to advance the idea that file sharing is not cannibalising music sales to the extent claimed by the music industry.

Arthur contends the decline in music revenues since 1999 has been driven by people switching their spending to other forms of entertainment, notably video games and DVDs. It’s a plausible idea, although as presented it remains only a correlation that may in reality be no more substantial than the view he seeks to challenge. (What if people are spending more on video games because they can get their music for free?). But I think we should welcome the fact these issues are being raised and debated within the context of a growing community of data sharers and mashup artists (now there’s an image to conjure with). So three cheers for guardian.co.uk.

All this has set me thinking that it would be great if all public agencies made their data available like this, actively encouraging users to analyse and share results in interesting and novel ways, rather than issuing statistics in static publications and news releases. Even if they don’t have the web 2.0 infrastructure to do it themselves, perhaps public data owners should donate their holdings to the Data Store, or equivalents. This would deliver genuine public value, and the quid pro quo is that data owners may even learn something new about the information they hold, if enough people run inspired and innovative analyses.

Anyone who has ever visited the lamentably labyrinthine and obstructive web site operated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) surely must agree that a bit of community datasourcing (crowdsourcing for anoraks like me) has got to be an improvement. The Data Store has left me hungry for more.

Pie chart and mashup, anyone?

Piracy: latest research

Last week’s publication of a report for the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP) sheds further light on unauthorised downloading activity in the UK (Copycats? Digital Consumers in the on-line age).

But before launching into the key findings, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the provenance and methodology of the research. The study was undertaken by University College London’s CIBER team, which operates independently of the creative industries. This means their assessment of the scale and nature of unauthorised online distribution is impartial- a valuable trait in this highly charged and controversial area.

Furthermore, SABIP, who commissioned the research, is a Non-Departmental Public Body sponsored by the government’s Intellectual Property Office. It advises Ministers and the Intellectual Property Office Chief Executive on the development of intellectual property policy. In other words, SABIP carries some clout in policy terms.

In terms of methods, the research involved a review of exiting literature (mainly primary research carried out by other academics, in the UK and internationally); selected interviews with ‘major stakeholders, regulatory bodies and industry experts’; analysis of media reports on the subject of ‘digital consumers’ in the period January to April 2009; and original fieldwork in the form of ‘an empirical exploration of the phenomenon of online downloading’ (i.e. ‘we went online and found out just how easy it is to “file share”).

So the balance of evidence comes from non-industry sources, although a lot of the large numbers quoted at the start of the report (and which found prominence in subsequent news reports) are from existing industry research (for example, the estimate that at least seven million people have downloaded unauthorised material in the UK). I’m not suggesting industry-derived data are suspect (far from it); but it is helpful, given the nature of the public debate, to draw upon independent evidence (or independently verified evidence) wherever possible.

Which is why the CIBER report is all the more valuable. And from an industry perspective (by industry, we’re talking about commercial music, film and TV businesses, and other IP rights holders including computer software publishers), the research lends weight to the view that piracy is a significant problem. Thus, the authors indulge in a back-of-the-Nicorette packet calculation and estimate that the online members of just one file sharing network consume approximately £12 billion worth of content annually for free. ‘These figures are staggering’, they conclude, and it's hard to disagree.

The CIBER team helpfully present their key findings using a rating scale, where one star means there is little evidence and five stars offer very strong, almost incontrovertible, evidence. In order of strength, here is what the current research literature tells us:

Very strong evidence (CIBER confidence rating: *****):

• ‘There are myriad choices when consuming content and consumers are confused about what is legal and not legal’;
• ‘Attitudes and behaviours towards property in the online and physical worlds are very different’;
• ‘It has never, ever been easier to break the law’;
• ‘Internet service providers and the consumer electronics industry: two elephants in the room’ (in other words, both ISPs and consumer electronics businesses are involuntarily complicit in unauthorised sharing, and they should therefore form part of the solution);

Strong, but not conclusive evidence (CIBER confidence rating: ****):

• ‘The scale of the "problem" is huge and growing’
• ‘There is a powerful idea that there is “no victim”, and so “no crime”’
• ‘Education isn’t working, yet’

The evidence base is somewhat inconclusive and contradictory here (CIBER confidence rating: ***)

• ‘There are fewer cues to guide behaviour in the online world’

In conclusion the authors call for further research, not least to address the ‘fundamental question’, which is not ‘how or why the downloading, copying and dissemination of unauthorised content takes place’, but ‘who does it, (and therefore, who doesn’t), and can this behaviour be changed?’. SABIP is in clear agreement. Dame Lynne Brindley, SABIP Board member, said at the time the research was published: ‘This report gives us some baseline evidence from which we can develop a clear research strategy to support policy development in this fast moving area.’

So we can expect more from CIBER in the near future. But as it is a fast moving area, will the research effort be able to keep pace?

Feeling the digital heat

The last few weeks have seen a flurry of news stories and events linked by a common theme: the opportunities and threats posed to the film business by digital technology.

Let’s deal with the threats first. For starters, a court in Sweden found those involved in Pirate Bay guilty of breaching copyright laws. That same week, figures released by Italy’s Federazione Anti-Pirateria Audiovisiva (FAPAV) put the annual loss to the local cinema industry at around $699m (Euros 530m). The research, conducted by IPSOS, estimated the number of Italian jobs at risk due to piracy to be around 250,000.

According to the study, just under one third (32%) of Italians (around 16 million) have used illegal copies of films over the past twelve months. These figures include all types of pirate activity but, significantly, online/digital film theft (e.g. illegal downloading and file sharing) accounted for 21% of illegal activity.

Closer to home, last week I attended an event in London hosted by the Film Theft Task Force entitled Digital Heat. The gathering provided a forum for the content and distribution sectors of the industry to consider ‘how digital technologies can be turned into legitimate business for the UK film and TV industries’.

The discussion hinged around the question of how best to capitalise on the opportunities presented by digital distribution while managing the attendant risks. A short AV presentation kicked off proceedings with some indicative data:

Opportunities…
• 67% of UK households had access to broadband in 2008
• 23.5 million people use the internet every day
• 16-24 use it most (77% every day)
• 20.2 million people have used a legitimate online content service - doubling use since 2007
• Most (96%) used free streaming sites

Threats…
• Annual loss to the UK audio visual industries from film theft is estimated to run at around £500 million
• 62% of people who use illegal online services would think twice if they faced suspension by their ISP
• 66% of adult file sharers would stop accessing illegal content if they thought they had a greater chance of being caught

The AV was merely a warm-up act for the main billing: a panel discussion chaired by Michael Gubbins (former editor of Screen International) and featuring Stephen Garrett (Joint MD Kudos Film and Television), Andrew Keyte (CEO FilmFlex Movies), Simon Morris (co-founder and Marketing Director, LoveFilm), Jonathan Lewis (Head of Digital Media at Five TV) and Steve Purdham (CEO, We 7).

I can’t possibly do justice to what turned out to be a highly informative and entertaining debate, but the discussion boiled down as follows:

1. We’re living in a digitally converged age- it’s no longer just around the corner, it’s a reality and it’s time to face up to the fact.
2. The vast scale of online film theft demonstrates one simple truth: there is huge demand for accessible, good quality audio visual content. The legitimate business has so far failed to meet this demand, and file sharing and other forms of film theft are flourishing.
3. Whatever business models are developed to tap this latent demand, they must satisfy three criteria: 

• Online content is very price sensitive (the pirates are offering the stuff for free!)- so download to own or rent, or streaming services, must be offered at very competitive rates, or free to the user (funded by advertising, sponsorship etc.).
• Consumers want content whenever and wherever they can get it: release windows and DRM create barriers and must be scrapped.
• Consumers will switch to legitimate platforms provided they get a good service (something the file sharers cannot provide, or have no interest in providing). That means reliable delivery, high quality product and a user interface that makes purchasing or consuming as straightforward as possible.

There was broad agreement across the panel for points 1 and 2, but less consensus about the solution outlined in point 3.

Steve Purdham was the most vocal advocate of the new approach. His company offers users free music through a streaming and download service supported by advertising (although Purdham is bankrolling the service at present, as he builds the subscriber base). Users have to listen to an advertisement ‘grafted’ onto the start of the free stream, and then they are offered the option of buying the track to download.

Purdham is confident that advertising-led services can flourish, and he made a convincing case for the potential of such a model. By asking users to register for the free service, the door is opened to selling and marketing to them in more conventional ways. Peer-to-peer transactions are anonymous, but there’s an opportunity for legitimate business to build a marketing database on a global scale.

Yet as Stephen Garrett noted, this model may work well for music but the cost of making top quality TV or film content is too high to be carried by advertising-based models alone. He described the situation in the indie TV sector, where companies like Kudos finance production on the strength of future income- and that includes the lucrative DVD and pay-TV markets. The big question is whether online revenues will ever provide the sort of income stream offered by existing ancillaries.

But the matter need not, of course, boil down to an ‘either / or’ option. Looking around at the legitimate online services currently being offered, there are encouraging signs of a mixed economy of services developing. For example, Danny King, writing last week in Video Business, reports growth in Netflix’s first-quarter profit and subscriber numbers. Netflix straddles the physical, packaged media market (DVD rental by post) and has moved into online distribution with its streaming service.

The company saw net income rise by 68% to $22.4 million, as sales rose 21% to $394.1 million. The Netflix subscriber base grew by 920,000 during the quarter, up 25% from a year earlier to 10.31 million, making it the biggest movie-rental service via mail company in the US.

Netflix’s video-streaming service now has 11.5 million customers, and it appears to be augmenting, rather than cannibalising, the existing DVD business: “While it’s clear that instantly streaming movies … is energizing our growth, our subscribers in total are renting more DVDs and Blu-ray movies than ever,” Reed Hastings, CEO, said. The company anticipates the DVD market will peak between 2013 and 2018, but has ruled out a streaming-only subscription option anytime soon.

New online movie services, like iReel.com in the US, are developing all the time, while existing ones are jazzing up their consumer offer. For example, Amazon.com announced last week it plans to launch HD (high-definition video) content to its on-demand service.  "Our customers have been asking us for two things: HD and the ability to watch movies and TV shows instantly on their television," said Bill Carr, Amazon vice president of music and video.

But for all this activity, there is still no single destination offering the breadth of content, viewing flexibility and the value for money demanded by consumers- a point taken up by LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in his The Big Picture blog.

‘Why has Hollywood been so slow to put its movies and TV shows online?’ Goldstein asks. Quoting technology columnist Farhad Manjoo, he offers a plausible explanation, citing lessons to be learned from the pirates:

As Manjoo confesses: "I would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for [a download service] -- if someone would take my money. In reality, I pay nothing because no company sells such a plan. Instead, I've been getting my programming from the friendly BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Pirates aren't popular these days, but let's give them this -- they know how to put together a killer on-demand entertainment system."

Neither Netflix, iTunes or any of the other legitimate services offer anything like the variety and accessibility of peer-to-peer networks for one obvious reason: they are hamstrung by ‘a "byzantine set of contractual relationships" among studios, distributors, cable channels and a variety of other parties.’

The studios won't release movies online day and date with their theatrical release, fearing the availability will cannibalize their performance in the theaters, not to mention enraging theater owners. After movies arrive on DVD, they are also becoming available on pay-per-view, then a few months later they go to premium, HBO-style pay-cable channels, which get a 15- to 18-month exclusive window in which to show the film. As Manjoo explains: "That's why you can't get older titles through Apple's rental plan -- once the movie goes to HBO, Apple loses the right to rent it."

Movies then "make a tour" of ad-supported cable and broadcast networks before returning to outlets like Starz for a second run. Only years after its initial release, when a film enters its "library" phase, are companies like Netflix allowed to license it for streaming. There's a growing generation of consumers eager to see studios shorten or do away with all these windows, but the studios are in no rush -- they say these deals are worth billions, so why sacrifice built-in profits for an uncertain future?

Goldstein concludes with a warning: if the business fights to protect its existing revenue streams it risks continuing to lose out to the pirates. Consumers will go where the content is- and unless legitimate alternatives are offered in double quick time, a golden opportunity to grow the business in news ways may be missed:

You have to wonder if by the time Hollywood makes movies easily available online, the dogs will have barked and the caravan will have moved on. In other words, it might be too late.

Making it in the Digital Age

The Digital Age. We’re in it now. It’s great. We can all do lots of cool stuff (time, inclination and wherewithal permitting). Anyone can be creative. Anyone can be an artist, entertainer, opinion former. No need for an agent, publisher, record company, film distributor or whatnot. That’s what we’re told.

But how can anyone find an audience, make a living and build a creative career in the Digital Age, while remaining free of The Man, philistine executives and/or profit-obsessed multinationals? That’s a question that has garnered more pixel time in the blogosphere than probably any other issue facing the indie film community of late.

Scott Kirsner has contributed more to the debate than most, through his blog, talks and appearances at festivals and other events. He’s also just published Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age, which promises to give the most up to date airing of the main themes.

The book, which is available, appropriately enough, in PDF form as a paid download, is based on interviews with people at the coalface: filmmakers, writers, musicians and other performers. The chapter that holds most interest for me is entitled 'Exploring the New Business Models'. In October last year I posted about my experience at the Power to the Pixel event, voicing my disappointment at the lack of any compelling evidence of workable business models that can sustain creative enterprises beyond one-off projects. Scott has since commented on the post, and I look forward to reading what he has to say about the models currently being developed and road-tested by his interviewees.

You can check out a 35 page preview of Scott's book on his web site, and an early review by Chuck Tryon, author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, can be found over at the Chutry Experiment.

DVD versus digital distribution revenues

Author and blogger Scott Kirsner moderated a panel discussion at the recent SXSW 2009 event (in Austin, Texas), about how indie filmmakers can maximise their revenues from DVD and digital distribution ('The Future of DVDs and Digital Distribution'). Panellists included executives from New Video, Cinetic Rights Management and SnagFilms, plus filmmakers Gary Hustwit and Morgan Spurlock.

Scott’s entertaining and informative Cinematech blog carries an account of the event, and I was intrigued to learn about the relative value of DVD and digital revenues to indie filmmakers.

According to the Cinematech post, the panellists ‘seemed to agree that there's about a 90/10 breakdown today, in terms of the ratio of DVD revenues to digital.’

Kirsner reports that Hustwit’s documentary 'Helvetica' has earned in the region of $60,000 in digital revenues despite being among the top ten documentary downloads on iTunes.

Meanwhile Spurlock's acclaimed 'Super Size Me' doco earned just $1,200 from SnagFilms over a two-month period (and that includes money from 19 other titles supplied by the filmmaker to the site). That compares with 70,000 ‘Super Size Me’ DVDs sold in the US in the last quarter of 2008 alone.

"If you’re looking to pay your rent [with digital distribution], not so much,” Spurlock told the gathering. “But if you’re looking to pay your phone bill, you have a great chance."

By happy coincidence I recently came across some comparable numbers from a UK indie distributor (Metrodome- which released titles including the extreme sports IMAX documentary ‘Steep’, ‘Fear(s) of the Dark’ and ‘The Warlords’ in 2008).

Metrodome Group plc (to give its full name) is a listed company with an investors’ page offering a preliminary financial statement for the year ended 31 December 2008. There’s plenty one can learn about the state of UK independent distribution from the financial data presented (the subject of a future post, maybe), but in the context of Scott Kirsner’s post I want to draw attention to the breakdown of the Group’s distribution revenue in 2008. As we're talking about distribution revenues not filmmakers' income it's not a like-for-like comparison, but I think it's instructive nonetheless.

According to the figures presented in the statement, Metrodome Group derived a hearty 84.4% of its revenues from DVD sell through in 2008, totalling £5.5 million (up from 76.8% in 2007). DVD rental accounted for only 2.2% of total revenues, and cinema sales generated just 2.3%. Meanwhile Video on Demand, which includes sales through multichannel TV platforms as well as online distribution channels, accounted for 5.5% of revenues (£364,000), up 171.6% on the 2007 total.

So while digital distribution remains a relatively small revenue stream, in line with the experiences recounted by filmmakers at SXSW 2009, it does at least appear to be a growth area for Metrodome. It'll be interesting to see how this trend develops over the next year or so, particulary in view of the uptake of Blu-ray (physical media's last gasp?) and the continued expansion of high speed broadband networks (a key driver for online distribution).

US home entertainment market: a year in review

With the closing bars of Auld Lang Syne fading once more into bleary memory, along with wistful recognition of another year gone by, we can take cheer from the fact that around this time of year there’s an outpouring of information about what the previous twelve months have served up.

A great example appears in the latest edition of Home Media Magazine (28 December- 4 January), available for free as an e-publication.

Erik Gruenwedel and Chris Tribbey provide a staggeringly detailed account of the highs and lows of the year in home entertainment, one month at a time. They recount the key events in an extraordinary year (for all the right and wrong reasons), including who bought out whom, what flopped (HD DVD, consigned to history back in February) and what flew (Warner’s The Dark Knight shattered records shifting 13.5 million units worldwide in December).

Scanning the past twelve months in this way highlights the daunting speed with which things changed as the economy soured. Thus in February Lionsgate confidently projected DVD sales for the year would be up 6% on 2007. By November the mini-major had released 17 employees (8% of its workforce), despite strong home entertainment sales.

And there was plenty of scope for hubris in 2008. In March, shares in Netflix reached record highs ‘after analysts say the online DVD rental pioneer was too cautious in fiscal projections’. Not cautious enough as it happens: a month later (April), shares in the company nosedived after it lowered full year earnings ‘due to costs associated with offering free streaming to subscribers’. 

The year also saw the first flowering of the enormous potential of legitimate digital downloads. In May, Apple’s iTunes began offering movie downloads to purchase on the same day as DVDs. By June Apple announced that its customers were downloading around 50,000 movies a day on iTunes. And in July, Bob Iger, Disney president and CEO, informed analysts his company had sold 5 million movie downloads on iTunes since 2006. The competition started heating up in November when Sonic Solutions bought movie download service CinemaNow, with its 6,000 title catalogue.

Best of all, Rentrak Corp., the box office tracking company, announced in July it was working with studios to track streamed and downloaded content. Which means better quality data about Internet revenues should be available through the company’s Digital Download Essentials service.

2008 was also the year Blu-ray finally began to take off (after laying its rival format to rest). In October, Paramount’s Iron Man sold 7.2 million DVDs in its first week, and more than 500,000 Blu-ray units. In one day alone it shifted 260,000 Blu-ray units, a record for the format. And in December, NPD Group reported that 147,000 standalone Blu-ray players were sold in the US during the week after Thanksgiving.

Montage: Converging media; Danish admissions; BFI research guide

This week law firm Olswang published the results of its annual ‘convergence’ survey, examining UK attitudes to different media platforms. Taken together the findings indicate that viewer choice and control are important drivers of consumer satisfaction, which suggests anything impeding easy access to content, like Digital Rights Management or release windows, is a demand-side no-no.

The research is based on a survey of 1,162 respondents (235 children aged 13-15 and 927 adults) conducted by YouGov between 25 September and 3 October 2008. YouGov also hosted a number of focus groups, designed ‘to explore in more detail the effects of convergence on the activities of distinct types of consumer’. These groups include ‘kids’, ‘mainstream’ adults, ‘tech vanguard’ and ‘laggards’. This last category comprises late adopters, rather than Luddites; the survey and focus groups were conducted online, so all respondents had access to the Internet.

Taking solace from quanta

According to enigmax, writing for TorrentFreak, Mr Bond’s 22nd big screen outing (Quantum of Solace) leaked onto the Internet before it bowed in the US last weekend.

That’s despite a massive counter-piracy campaign in the UK (where the film opened two weeks ago) involving cinema staff donning night vision goggles (supplied by Q?) to catch camcorder users in the act.

This news came in the same week that Detica, a business and technology consultancy, urged the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) ‘to shift the focus of its consultation process away from enforcement when considering legislative options for addressing illicit peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.’

Detica reckons enforcement is too costly and time-consuming so efforts should instead be directed towards giving consumers access to reasonably (and flexibly) priced legal downloads. This sounds like a sensible option given that an army of begoggled cinema ushers still failed to prevent the camcordering of everyone's favourite spy. 

So has peer-to-peer filesharing had any material impact on Bond’s theatrical performance? Yes, probably. But we’ll never know for certain the order of magnitude involved.

Yet the film’s distributors and producers can take some comfort from the early box office results. QoS had a record-breaking opening day in the UK, and went on to amass £15.4 million by the end of the first weekend.

And despite its online availability, QoS had the highest US opening of any previous film in the franchise, grossing around $70 million according to early estimates (Casino Royale managed around $40 million in its opening weekend at about the same time of year).

Which just goes to prove that in times of financial uncertainty, some bonds are a much safer bet than others.

DIY filmmaking: a Halloween special

Listening to filmmaker Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) at last week’s Digital Distribution and Film Innovation Forum put me in mind of Peter Jackson, whose birthday it is today.

Arin gave some fascinating insights into his filmmaking approach, and waxed lyrical about the 4k Red digital camera, which Jackson used to shoot a short WWI-set film last year.

But it’s not just a shared interest in revolutionary kit that unites these two filmmakers. Although Jackson had his first break with Bad Taste in the analogue age, his style of DIY filmmaking is very much on a par with today’s generation of digital content innovators who find ingenious ways to get their creative vision on the screen.

DIY distribution: the emperor’s virtual clothes?

Yesterday I was pleased to attend Power to the Pixel’s Digital Distribution and Film Innovation Forum in London. It was an excellent event: lively, engaging and informative. The line-up was varied and the speakers came across as articulate, intelligent and very, very capable individuals who have managed, by hook or by crook, to bring their creative vision to the masses, or help others to do so.

But…there’s always a but (the proctologists’ motto). As I mentioned in my last post, I went to the event in the hope of finding evidence (i.e. concrete, tangible, bite-me-on-the-bum, QED hard data) of a self-distribution business model capable of creating sustainable enterprises. And I have to say, though it pains me to do so, I came away disappointed.

Digital technology has definitely delivered on its promise of democratising production. No doubt about it. But so far it has fallen short of enabling filmmakers to generate sufficient amounts of cold, hard cash to develop businesses that can thrive in the medium to long-term.

Montage: UK boffo news; Tory film policy; US DVD trade; Slovenia update; Power to the Pixel!

Rather belatedly I stumbled across Charles Gant’s first UK box office post on the Guardian Film blog (posted on 13 October), and it’s worth drawing attention to. Gant is Heat’s Film Editor and a Sight and Sound contributor, and his post provides an elegant and informed thumbnail sketch of the weekend’s top box office performers in the UK.

Significantly, the post came out on Monday afternoon, making it by far the timeliest publication of UK weekend grosses. The equivalent figures in the US appear all over the place as soon as they are available, but in the UK Nielsen EDI keeps a tight rein on publication. For example, the UK Film Council is not allowed to publish its table of the top 15 performers until Wednesday, which is deeply frustrating for all concerned (as blurredvision commented on Gant’s blog post).

By the time you read this, Gant’s second post may already be up (assuming he’s planning to post every Monday). Make the most of it- timely data is a precious resource. The only caveat is that Gant's box office ranking only goes as far as the top ten, plus other new releases.

Before taking a look at the latest DVD retail and rental figures from the US, I’d like to stick with the UK theme a moment longer to bring news of the Conservative’s film policy ideas.

Montage: Boffo updates for Finland and Germany; Netflix slowdown; film studies for free!

The Finnish Film Foundation has just published a box office update for 2008, and it’s good news for local films. They have so far attracted more than 1.1 million Finnish cinemagoers. This puts the market share of Finnish films at around 20%, and, as Cineuropa’s correspondent reports, there is every chance the final tally for local films will exceed last year’s total of 1.3 million admissions.

Meanwhile, German box office results for the third quarter (July to September) are decidedly mixed. Martin Blaney, writing in Screen Daily, reports figures published by Nielsen EDI showing a 7% fall in admissions against the same period last year, although box office gross remained on par for the quarter. Year to date totals (January to September) are down 2.4% for admissions (at 87.7 million) and 1.3% for box office gross (Euros 544.4 million).

Over the pond, Dawn C. Chmielewski, blogging for the LA Times, reports that Netflix, a US based DVD-by-mail and online film download company, suffered a lousy August and only a tepid September due in part to the wider problems afflicting the US economy. 

"Net subscriber growth in July was in line with expectations, but August was unusually weak," Chief Financial Officer Barry McCarthy said in a statement. "In September, the business regained momentum with results slightly below original expectations, likely due to the economic climate."

Michael Pachter, of Wedbush Morgan Securities, told the LA Times:

"The average consumer couldn't help but be scared in the month of September, with all that’s going on," Pachter said. "Even though Netflix is a very low-cost way to watch movies, it’s still hard to commit (to a monthly subscription) if you’re not absolutely secure you're going to have an income, have a job."

Netflix currently has around 8.7 million subscribers, up 23% from the same time last year. So it’s not all bad news.

And finally, here’s a great link. Catherine Grant, writing in her Film Studies for Free blog, has posted a list of Film and Media Studies e-journals available online for free. ‘Free’ is a great draw at times like these (with the free market in freefall), but Dr Grant’s mission goes beyond simple parsimony. Her blog is part of the growing movement towards ‘open access’, promoting ‘free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals’ (that's according to Wikipedia’s entry on ‘open access’). In other words, Freedom of Information in the truest sense. Bravo.

Short film update

Here are a couple of items in follow up to my earlier post about the lack of hard data on short film making and distribution in the UK.

First up, Adrian Hope (Web and Information Officer, Arts Group, British Council) has kindly provided details about how the British Council collects the short film information published in the British Films Catalogue, which forms the basis of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Film UK Guide to British Film.

Adrian writes:

'We agree to send the info to EIFF that we have collected for our own catalogue. We have an online form to collect the information on our site at www.britfilms.com. Each year we publish it as our British Film Catalogue, which we distribute to our offices around the world and at the events we attend (for example at the UK Film Centre at Cannes).

We get a lot of shorts submitted this way but for features we often have to contact production and distribution companies directly to get them to provide us with the information. Generally we do this annually (around this time of the year) as part of getting the print publication ready, although we also do this at other times, for example if there are British films showing at festivals which are not on our site. The content of the catalogue is replicated online (although the online version is more up to date as films go onto it immediately).
 
The online submission form explains more how we deal with verification and there is a legal statement at the bottom. Basically we trust whoever submits the form to provide us with the right information, and if there is a problem (every couple of months we get people saying they should be credited or that other information is wrong) we contact whoever gave us the information originally for clarification. We generally get information from either a film maker or producer themselves, or representatives in production or distribution companies. If someone completes a form and they are clearly unconnected with the film, we would at least check and probably reject the listing (although, this situation rarely happens.)

We also have a ‘films in progress’ section where we put up information on films we know of that are at least at the principal photography stage. Here we are less stringent with where the information comes from and add info about films our film advisors know about as well as ones submitted directly by film makers.
 
Once the submission form is sent we check it, for issues as above and spelling, standardising the contact details and general tidying up, and then we post it on the site.'

There's no doubt the British Films Catalogue offers a valuable listings service for UK films, helping to promote them internationally. But because the underlying database is not directly accessible to users it’s impossible to drill down into the information or to run even basic analyses.  For example, each short film profile contains information about what format the work was shot in, and it would be interesting to chart the rise in use of DV and other digital formats over time. This task isn't possible from the publicly accessible front end of the database.

Meanwhile over at Shooting People, Ingrid Kopp (Head of US Operations) has posted a link to a booklet offering tips on web 2.0 opportunities for short film makers (that's makers of short films, not diminutive auteurs). The resource accompanied the Short Sighted event hosted by Shooting People and BAFTA in September. The booklet is available as a free PDF and also contains contact information for short film sales agents, details of the top shorts festivals and other useful organisations. In addition you can find links to DIY distribution sites, downloading and DVD-on-demand sites as well as other places providing access (free or otherwise) to shorts.

Montage: UK admissions 2008; top grossing films; high tech Korea

The Film Distributors’ Association has just released the latest UK monthly admissions figures, revealing that ticket sales between January and August were 1.5% lower than the same period in 2007. This puts 2008’s admissions total for the period at fourth place behind 2002, 2004 and 2007. There is a definite downward trend in UK admissions since 2002, despite annual fluctuations (see table below).

2008’s fall in admissions from the previous year masks the fact that August performed exceptionally strongly. With admissions totalling 20,400,930 it was the best August since 2002, a full 15% increase on the next highest total (achieved in 2007) despite the woes besetting the wider economy. It’ll be interesting to see how September fared, with a weaker slate of releases and the after shock of the Nightmare on Wall Street.

Mamma Mia! certainly played its part in August. The film, the UK’s top grosser in 2008 by a considerable margin, is now the third highest earning film at the UK box office since 1998, after Titanic and Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (box office gross unadjusted for inflation).

By 28 September it had taken £62,730,735 in its twelfth week on release. If it keeps up this pace it might even knock the boy wizard off his perch. The film’s only real competition for top spot in 2008, Quantum of Solace (released 31 October), is unlikely to mount a serious challenge despite the buzz it has already generated. Casino Royale took £55.6 million in 2006 and it’s hard to imagine QoS will trump this.

Montage: French VOD, Channel 4, Oz distribution & Mamma Mia!

According to Variety, a report by research group GfK and French media consultants NPA Conseil predicts the French video-on-demand (VOD) market could double in value in 2008. NPA managing consultant Jean-Marie Le Guen estimates the French market could be worth E60 million in 2008, up from E30 million in 2007.

The study that found around 6 million VOD downloads were made during the first six months of 2008, a 61% increase over the same period a year earlier. US films saw the biggest growth rate (93%), compared with around 20% for French films and 53% for other titles. Film downloads make up about two-thirds of the French VOD market.

* * * * *
Reports claim Channel 4 is to make around 150 staff redundant (15% of its total workforce) in a cost-cutting exercise to save up to £100m over two years.

It’s not yet known which areas will suffer from the budget cuts although Channel 4 has previously said it will be forced to decrease foreign acquisitions.

The FT reports:

'“It will mean less in the way of one-off dramas and high-end documentaries,” a person familiar with the nature of the cuts said. “Nobody would expect Channel 4, in an increasingly tough market, to be making cuts in programmes that make money for the company.”'

As Channel 4 is an important supporter of British and specialised film, through Film4 Productions (to the tune of around £10 million pa) and programming acquisitions, the question is how will these areas fare in the current squeeze?