Timing is Money - Evaluating the Effects of Early Availability of Feature Films via Video on Demand

Based on survey data from 489 German potential Video On Demand users this research explores effects of early movie availability on consumers’ utility, their willingness to pay, and copyright violations. Using a triangulation approach, we employed adaptive conjoint analysis and contingent valuation methodologies. Our results show substantially increased utility levels and greater willingness to pay for Video On Demand services that offer movies simultaneously with or shortly before the first official theatrical release. Our findings bear similarities to results from experiments on hyperbolic discounting, a concept from the field of behavioral economics. Diverging from classic microeconomic theory, immediate consumption seems to be valued irrationally high. This effect is even stronger for copyright violators. Implications both for future academic research and for the motion picture industry are drawn

The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research, and New Research Directions

The motion picture industry has provided a fruitful research domain for scholars in marketing and other disciplines. The industry has high economic importance and is appealing to researchers because it offers both rich data that cover the entire product lifecycle for many new products and because it provides many unsolved “puzzles.” Although the amount of scholarly research in this area is rapidly growing, its impact on practice has not been as significant as in other industries (e.g., consumer packaged goods). In this article, we discuss critical practical issues for the motion picture industry, review existing knowledge on those issues, and outline promising research directions. Our review is organized around the three key stages in the value chain for theatrical motion pictures: production, distribution, and exhibition. Focusing on what we believe are critical managerial issues, we propose various conjectures—framed either as research challenges or specific research hypotheses—related to each stage in the value chain and often involved in understanding consumer movie-going behavior

Leveraging analytics to produce compelling and profitable film content

Producing compelling film content profitably is a top priority to the long-term prosperity of the film industry. Advances in digital technologies, increasing availabilities of granular big data, rapid diffusion of analytic techniques, and intensified competition from user generated content and original content produced by Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platforms have created unparalleled needs and opportunities for film producers to leverage analytics in content production. Built upon the theories of value creation and film production, this article proposes a conceptual framework of key analytic techniques that film producers may engage throughout the production process, such as script analytics, talent analytics, and audience analytics. The article further synthesizes the state-of-the-art research on and applications of these analytics, discuss the prospect of leveraging analytics in film production, and suggest fruitful avenues for future research with important managerial implications

The Economics of the Audiovisual Industry

Finance and Banking, General Financ

ESSAYS ON NUDGING CUSTOMERS’ BEHAVIORS: EVIDENCE FROM ONLINE GROCERY SHOPPING AND CROWDFUNDING

The dissertation consists of three essays that employ predictive analytics, structural modeling techniques and field experiments to understand and nudge customers’ behaviors in two types of online engagement platforms. The first one is customers’ purchase behaviors in an online grocery store and the other is customer’ contribution behaviors in a reward-based crowdfunding platform. In both contexts, we study how to actively nudge their behaviors. In Chapter 2, we investigates how, when dealing with products that are available in limited quantities, customers may be nudged to purchase them. Specifically, our main problem is to identify targeted customers to receive the limited number of coupons. We develop a Support Vector Machines (SVM) based approach to rank order customers. We conduct a field experiment in an online grocery store to evaluate how well the identified customers are nudged through information and/or couponing. We find that, in terms of the successful nudges, our SVM-based approach performed better than other approaches

The Economics of the Audiovisual Industry

Finance and Banking, General Financ

Testament: Mastering and Transcending the Microbudget Model for a Feature Film

Testament is a feature film serving as part of Tim Ritter\u27s thesis requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in the Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema program at the University of Central Florida. The film follows a bitter former follower of a marginally popular social-justice movement who must keep the movement alive after its mysterious leader is killed violently and publicly. The drama, set in an fictional land known as The Commonwealth, presents a modern-day retelling of the life of St. Peter in the years after the death of Jesus, creating a new context for familiar Biblical tales and morals while also examining the high personal costs of changing the world. Testament has been produced for well under $50,000 as part of the microbudget requirements of the UCF Film program. In creating an epic with minimal resources, innovation has filled the void left by most films\u27 higher budgets, with the crew recycling a small number of locations to serve as several different locations and using a large cast sparingly to avoid becoming overly reliant on many actors who aren\u27t getting paid. This document details the theories and methodology behind the preparation and planned production of the film, as well as the approach planned for its distribution

Arrgh! Hollywood Targets Internet Piracy

As technology advances, the threat of rampant and unprecedented theft of digital media continues to grow. The music industry has already faced, and continues to face, this threat, but has largely failed in defending musicians’ intellectual property