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Industry Report: Market Trends

The European Audiovisual Observatory publishes its latest study on key trends in the European audiovisual sector

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The new edition of the research highlights the fact that the continent’s audiovisual sector grew by only 0.2% in real terms between 2015 and 2019

The European Audiovisual Observatory publishes its latest study on key trends in the European audiovisual sector

Last week, the European Audiovisual Observatory published its latest study on emerging trends in the European audiovisual sector, entitled “Yearbook 2020/2021. Key Trends. Television, Cinema, Video and On-demand Audiovisual Services – The Pan-European Picture”.

Among the main trends, the study indicates that 89% of films promoted on pay-per-view VoD had actually already had a cinema release; that the production of high-end TV series rose by 29% between 2014 and 2019 (a 54% growth since 2015; up 20% from 2018 to 2019); and that, in 2019, most of the traditionally UK-based broadcasting licences migrated to the Netherlands and Spain ahead of Brexit. Meanwhile, the report disclosed that European features directed by female-driven teams accounted for a share of 18%, recording significant differences across the different countries. Overall, women only represented 22% of directors with at least one European feature to their credit between 2015 and 2018. In TV fiction, female directors accounted for an even smaller share (19%) of all directors. Instead, the presence of women was higher among screenwriters, where they represented 25% of active professionals in film and 34% in TV fiction.

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On the topic of export figures, the three most important markets for European films in 2019 were the USA (162 films selling 36.1 million tickets), China (62 films selling 20.4 million tickets) and Germany (887 non-national European films selling 12.2 million tickets). The most heavily exported films by production country were from the UK (44%), France (18%), Spain (6%), Germany (6%), Belgium (5%) and Russia (5%).

In terms of production, 2,421 films were produced in Europe in 2019, and 1,926 of these were of EU origin. This marks a 6% increase over 2018 and a 13% growth over 2015 figures. In 2019, the three top-producing countries were Italy (312 films), France (240) and Germany (237). Despite the undeniable growth of European content, the continent’s audiovisual sector grew by only 0.2% in real terms between 2015 and 2019. Commenting on said figure, the European Audiovisual Observatory’s head of the Department for Market Information, Gilles Fontaine, explained: “Even before the COVID-19 crisis, the audiovisual sector was stagnating, and that was for a number of reasons: increasing competition for TV advertising from online advertising; pressure on the various countries’ budgets, translating into a decrease in real terms of the public funding of public service broadcasters; the collapse of the home-video market, despite its transition to digital; and initial signs of cord-cutting regarding pay television. The rather healthy cinema box office as well as the booming SVoD market hardly compensated for this.”

You can access the full report here.

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