- Video category saw year-on-year growth of 2.2%³ bringing total market value to £2.25bn
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens led the way as best-selling title of the year with over 2.3 million copies sold¹
- Digital video services increased 23% year-on-year ²
- Overall audio-visual industry grew 5.9% year-on-year² to £10.98 Billion²**
- TV on video buoyed by Games of Thrones franchise***
London, 5th January 2017: Figures released today by the British Association for Screen Entertainment (BASE) based on data from The Official Charts Company and IHS Markit show that consumer spend in the video category rose by 2.2% in 2016 bringing the total value of the category to £2.25 billion³*.
While ownership remains vital to the category and represents a massive 49.0% of category value, 2016 has also seen rental, or streaming overtake ownership, with 51.0% of value coming from consumers choosing to rent or stream. Highlighting the truly multichannel nature of the category, and the flexibility of content delivery of distributors to consumers.
Digital video services continued to show strong growth in 2016 increasing 23% year-on-year² and furthermore the overall audio-visual industry grew 5.9% across the year to a massive £10.98 billion²**. Demonstrating consumers love for the continued variety of content in entertainment and the flexibility of choice they have in terms of how they consume content, be that physically or digitally.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens lead the sales of the category with over 2.3 Million copies¹ passing through physical and digital retail, making it the best-selling video title of the year.
The format sales breakdown of Star Wars: The Force Awakens illustrates that consumers are taking full advantage of the format choice from the industry, with 51.5%¹ purchasing on DVD¹, 34.4% Blu-ray¹ and 14.1% Digital¹.
This is the second home entertainment record for Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2016 as the title took the mantle for fastest ever selling Blu-ray title earlier in the year, selling through 531,949 Blu-ray copies in the first week of release¹. The film is also the biggest film ever released at the UK box office.
Following the success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, other top successes in the film category included James Bond: Spectre*** and Ryan Reynolds’ anti-hero Deadpool both selling through over one million copies¹ and each approaching sales of over a quarter of a million digital copies¹.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was predominantly filmed in Britain and with a star studded British cast and crew it continued to play a key role in the 2016 end of year Official Video Charts.
Focussing on British talent, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Spectre both lead the pack in the charts. The adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and the Kray biopic film, Legend from StudioCanal both ended the year in the top ten chart¹.
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, had another stellar year, dominating both value and volume market share, taking 20.2% share of volume and 18.5% share of value¹. Universal Pictures’ breadth of content in 2016 has seen the distributor deliver content for every audience. Universal in 2016 has had the largest number of titles to surpass 100k units sales of any distributor. The 38 titles to have passed this milestone, range from animated new releases such as The Secret Life of Pets to out of this world blockbusters like Star Trek Beyond*** (label of Paramount), hard hitting drama Straight Out of Compton, and laugh out loud Dad’s Army as well as stand-up comedy, Billy Connolly’s High Horse Tour Live. In addition, big hitting catalogue titles such as Minions***, Jurassic World*** and Fifty Shades of Grey, have all sold more than 100k units this year helping move them all to over 1m units since first released in 2015¹. Even children’s pre-school titles have seen sales over 100k unit this year with Paw Patrol Pups And The Pirate Treasure (label of Paramount) being one of four from the franchise to surpass this threshold¹.
Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment UK led the Blu-ray market with 20.8% volume and 21.2% value share thanks to the combined success of Spectre***, Deadpool, The Martian and The Revenant¹.
Further appetite for high quality content was demonstrated by consumers as early adopters bought into the 4k UHD market. The category has now released 96 titles into the market on this new format, with Deadpool from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment UK, proving to be the most popular selling through over eleven thousand units¹.
Evergreen franchise Game of Thrones*** (Warner Bros) dominated the TV charts in 2016, with the Complete Fifth Season*** leading the pack selling through more than 470,000 units. Equating to overall franchise sales in 2016 of 1m units versus. The 891,000 units sold in 2015¹.
Home-grown talent from BBC Worldwide took three spots in the end of year TV chart with Planet Earth II*** selling over 130k units in just 4 weeks, The Best of Strictly Come Dancing: Len’s Grand Final and Peter Kay’s Car Share (Series 1), all charting in the Top 10 TV titles of the year¹.
2016 has been a year of particularly high quality British drama, The Night Manager from Sony has sold through 130k copies in 40 weeks, while ITV’s Victoria sold 54k copies in 12 weeks and War & Peace from the BBC has sold 50k copies in 47 weeks. While ITV’s new version of the vintage masterpiece Poldark continued to sell at a great rate, selling through 40k copies in 2016¹.
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