Study: Home Entertainment Remains 'Lifeblood' of U.K. Film, TV Industries

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LONDON - "Video revenues are the lifeblood of [the] U.K. film and TV industry," the British Video Association said in a report Friday.

It highlighted that 47 percent of feature films revenue came from home entertainment in 2011 and 34 percent of TV series revenue.

Overall U.K. video revenue last year amounted to £2.31 billion ($3.59 billion), down 2.2 percent from £2.36 billion ($3.67 billion) in 2010. But that was still more than twice the £1.1 billion ($1.7 billion) that consumers spent on theatrical film releases.

Physical discs still accounted for 88 percent of video revenue, or 1.75 billion ($2.72 billion) despite a 4.9 percent drop in revenue in a sign that DVD and Blu-ray discs remain by far the most popular way to watch video content in the U.K.

"The audiovisual industry is experiencing rapid and dynamic change as a result of digital technologies that create huge opportunities and challenges to a complex creative sector, which is shown in our report to be heavily reliant on video entertainment to generate returns on investment in film and television production," said Lavinia Carey, director general of the British Video Association. "It is vital, therefore, that additional uncertainty is not introduced into the sector by simplistic copyright policy changes or hesitancy in enforcing copyright law while our industry evolves."

Eddie Cunningham, president of Universal Pictures International Entertainment pointed to British productions as examples for how the video market enables successful projects. "Working Title’s Paul and Sennaare two great examples of British filmmaking at its best, and the revenue generated from video – more than 60 percent coming from home entertainment on these titles – is hugely important in helping British producers like Working Title re-invest back into production and continue to create great films," he said.

The BVA report was put together by Oxford Economics, which also worked on a study for U.K. pay TV giant BSkyB that was unveiled on Thursday. It showed that BSkyB contributed £5.4 billion ($8.4 billion) to the U.K. economy last year.