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

Population Structure of Invasive Streptococcus pneumoniae in the Netherlands in the Pre-Vaccination Era Assessed by MLVA and Capsular Sequence Typing

The introduction of nationwide pneumococcal vaccination may lead to serotype replacement and the emergence of new variants that have expanded their genetic repertoire through recombination. To monitor alterations in the pneumococcal population structure, we have developed and utilized Capsular Sequence Typing (CST) in addition to Multiple-Locus Variable number tandem repeat Analysis (MLVA)