The quantitative aspect

Practically, conducting a mixed methods project is resource intensive. A concurrent design means that the researcher effectively has to run two projects in parallel with all the time commitments that such an undertaking entails. This is often only practical for professional research agencies boasting separate qualitative and quantitative teams; the scope is too broad for a small-scale research project. However, the quantitative aspect of this project is based on publicly available data, mainly that published by the CNC. The presence of a wealth of statistics on the French film industry eliminates the need to design the data collection tools and collect the data for the quantitative phase; the researcher can focus on analysis and interpretation of the public domain information to generate new insight.

As part of its mission to support and promote the French audiovisual industry, the CNC collects detailed figures on each segment of the market and publishes them annually via reports on the development of digital television, on the video market and on cinema attendance. French film producers are required to make detailed submissions to qualify for subsidies, while cinema owners, television companies and providers of video-on-demand services must file their accounts to prove they are respecting their film funding commitments.

Amalgamating the information provided by the CNC, it is possible to build up a picture of the film industry stretching back to 1996 for cinema and to 2007 in the case of video on demand. This includes how many films were released by country of origin; the share of the market occupied by France, the US and other countries; and the top 10 titles per year in each sector – data which can be used to assess market diversity.

While using public data renders the project more manageable, the task is not straightforward. The information is dispersed, requiring effort to collate it. The CNC tends to include slices of the data in each report; information on the size of the video-on-demand market is published in the organisation’s annual report, but figures on the services used are covered in its review of

the video sector. Compiling the information requires understanding of the methods and definitions used to collect the data and constant cross comparison to ensure that consistent figures are taken from each source. The task is complicated further by the fact that the CNC may decide to publish the figures in different reports from one year to the next; it is not simply a case of looking at the same section of the annual report year after year.

Moreover, the CNC collects data to fulfil its mandate from the French government. As a result, the data have some limitations. For example, the CNC may not publish all the data points that are required for a full exploration of diversity in the French film industry. The agency provides a list of the top 50 films in cinemas in each year, but only the top 10 titles – both films and television programmes combined – downloaded from video-on-demand services. This limits the depth of the analysis that can be conducted on the latter. Both this and the dispersal of data across reports can be interpreted as a deliberate tactic; it allows the CNC to present the data in the way that best supports the case for its continuing existence.

Previous statistical analysis of the French film market was based on top-level figures on the number of films produced and their share of box office revenues, typically in a single year or over a short period117. This is the first time that the data has been mined more extensively to understand both the supply (the number of French films produced in total and as a proportion of the films released) and the demand side (what is consumed) in two different industry sectors – cinema and video on demand.

After compiling the data, the key challenge was to find a way to assess diversity and measure whether it exists to a greater or lesser degree, particularly such that it is possible to compare between sectors. In 2014, French films represented around 36 per cent of all video-on-demand

117 _{See Moreau and Peltier, ‘Cultural Diversity in the Movie Industry’, pp. 123-43, Jonathan Buchsbaum,}

‘“The Exception Culturelle is Dead” Long Live Cultural Diversity: French Cinema and the New Resistance”, Framework, Issue 1 (Spring 2006), pp 5-21 and Diana Crane, ‘Cultural globalization and the dominance of the American film industry: cultural policies, national film industries, and transnational film’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 20, Issue 4, (2014) pp. 365-382

sales, but enjoyed a 43 per cent share of box office revenue118. There is clearly a difference between the performance of French films in these two channels, but is it a statistically significant difference suggesting that the video-on-demand sector is less diverse? Cultural economists Peltier, Moreau and Benhamou have proposed a method for quantitatively assessing diversity which alleviates this problem of comparability; a detailed explanation of how it will be applied to the French film industry is included in Chapter 8119. Again, for the first time this advances discussion beyond a simple assertion of difference between the way French films perform in each sector.