Feasibility Study of a Digital Platform for the delivery of UK ... - BFI

UK FILM COUNCIL
hard to quantify in precise terms, and may be exaggerated by the fact that we are comparing with only the top mainstream titles of the
year.
Title by title comparisons
Theatrical
One valuable metric for quantifying the relative performance of different types of films through different windows is to simply compare
the number of people who consumed individual titles through window A with the number of people who consumed them through window
B. This can be shown as a simple ratio A/B. So if five times as many people saw a film at the cinema than bought it at the DVD store,
then the simple ratio of retail to theatrical consumption is 20 per cent.
For this analysis we have ignored the vast majority of UK and specialised film releases and concentrated only on the top 25 of these
releases in each of 2003 and 2004 (50 films in total). Not only does this substantially remove the bias that we had for the comparative
mainstream films towards the top end of the market only, but it also
10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
Ratio of online rentals to cinema admissions for films
released in 2003 and 2004
removes a whole raft of films from the analysis for which the
numbers were so low in certain windows that the ratios with other
windows became meaninglessly large.
Each of the bars in the chart on the left represents one release, the
darker bars represent the top UK and specialised films from 2003 and
2004, and the lighter bars represent the top mainstream titles.
The chart shows that a handful of top UK and specialised films
generated online rental transactions that numbered at least a tenth of
the admissions that they attracted in the cinemas. For these films,
the audience was increased by at least 10 per cent on theatrical as a
result of the online rental release. One film attracted 22 per cent the
number of theatrical admissions in the online space.
About a fifth of the UK and specialised films attracted transactions
that numbered at least five per cent of their cinema admissions
Feasibility Study for a Digital Platform for the delivery of Independent UK films and Specialised films to the Home
UK Film Council © 2006
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