Video
Sell-Through and the Problem of Reaching Audiences
Presented at the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies conference, London, 3 April 2005.
From
the late 1970s there are a number of small grant-aided organisations
in the UK involved in the distribution and promotion of artists'
film and video - namely London Filmmakers' Coop, London Video
Arts (later renamed London Electronic Arts), Circles (relaunched
later as Cinenova), and more recently the Lux. As revenue
funding for the so-called independent film and video sector
starts to diminish towards the end of the 1980s and beginning
of the 1990s, these organisations are forced to look at ways
of developing other sources of income. Largely with the encouragement
of their funders they all explore avenues for increasing the
sizes of the audiences for the work they distribute, with
a view to increasing the volume of hires and sales for that
work, and hence their earned income. Although expanding sales
to television is one obvious strategy, the video sell-through
market is also identified by funders and distributors alike
as a previously unexploited market.
This paper
will examine some of the attempts to embrace the retail video
sell-through market in the 1990s as a way of getting artists'
moving image work to a wider public, such as London Electronic
Arts launching Video Burn and their subsequent involvement
with editions à voir, together with the launching
of specialist labels such as the lesbian and gay labels Dangerous
to Know and Out on a Limb. On the whole these attempts
were unsuccessful and the reasons for this will be discussed
in relation to the market and economic models. These initiatives
will also be contextualised within a longer history of 'sell-through'
type strategies such as programme packaging, bookshop outlets,
video 'magazines', the mail order business of political/educational
distributors such as Albany Video Distribution, and the rise
of subcultural/cult labels such as Jettisoundz.
Whilst the
initiatives of the 1990s were largely unsuccessful, the advent
of the internet (primarily as a means of marketing and selling)
and DVD (as a means of distribution/delivery) have revitalised
interest in selling artists' moving image work direct to the
public. The paper will conclude by looking at the impact of
this growing area.
Julia Knight
Reader and Lead Researcher on the AHRB funded project 'Independent
Film and Video Distribution in the UK, 1980-present', University
of Luton
julia.knight@luton.ac.uk
|
