White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 7premiere and therefore most have onlyrecently left the cinemas. Interestingly,Happy Channel broadcasts the mostall-Italian productions, usuallyconsisting of comedies, starring actorswith strong television backgrounds.Lastly, as regards pay-for-view, in 2005,Italian films only accounted for 12.5%of the overall offering of Sky, with apeak of 20% in the months ofSeptember and October and the lowestfigure of 3.4% in the month of August.Albeit with due caution because of alack of complete data, we can arguethat the role of Italian films in pay-TVchannels is fairly marginal, at least innumerical terms. In fact, although wecannot express judgements on theresults obtained by domestic films interms of audiences, showing times, orincome from selling rights, the datashown in the tables here enable us todeduce that the share of Italian filmsshown on pay-TVs is very small andeven less than on generalist television.Home video filmsAnother important distribution channelfor films is home video, which includesboth sell-through and rental. In thefollowing paragraphs we again focus onthe Italian situation in an attempt todescribe the situation of the domestichome video market compared to theEuropean and US markets, the kind ofresults Italian films have obtained inthis sector, and the nature of the criticalfactors of success.Before beginning our analysis, it isworthwhile tackling a rather tricky andoften misunderstood issue. Therelation between spending on homevideo and spending at the box office.In fact as shown in Figure 26, since2002, Italians have spent more onhome video than at the cinema, but thisdoes not mean we can say home videois more economically important thancinemas for the production of films.On the contrary, for an individual film,the return on investment generated bythe box office is higher than that fromhome video. In fact home video doesnot include films recently distributed incinemas among their products and, inaddition to a large catalogue of classicfilms, they also feature many differentproducts, such as concerts andtelevision series. As we can see inFigure 27, although the main productof Italian home videos is still films, in2005 the percentage share enjoyed byother audiovisual products (especiallytelevision series) rose sharply. Thus thesales volume of cinemas are onlypartially comparable to the overallvalue generated by the home videosegment, since it has a much broaderproduct portfolio.As far as the Italian home videosituation is concerned, summing up, wecan say that from 2000 to 2005 therewas a significant increase in overallsales volume, mainly thanks to thesharp rise in sell-through. As shown inthe following table, the driving force inthe market was the sale of DVDs atnews<strong>paper</strong>s stands.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 180