Figures released by the British Association for Screen Entertainment (BASE), Omdia, Kantar, Futuresource Consulting, and Official Charts Company have valued the UK screen industry at £12.5bn for 2023, a 5.6% YoY growth in a year when the UK Box Office topped £1bn for the first time since the pandemic. This was inclusive of SVoD, Premium AVoD, TVoD, Physical, Cinema and Pay TV.
The UK Home Entertainment Category rose to £4.9bn in 2023 inclusive of all Streaming Video on Demand (SVoD), digital, disc sales, and rental (electronic sell through (EST), Video on Demand (VOD), DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K UHD, boxset), up 10.8% Year on Year (YoY), following a 14.3% rise YoY in 2022. Official Charts Company measures individual content purchases on disc and digital, to rent, buy or own in the UK, unlike multi-content SVoD services.
Barbie was the UK’s biggest visual entertainment title across theatrical and home entertainment, with a performance of £95.6m at the UK Box Office, as well as a value of over £9.9m across transactional home entertainment in 2023, through Premium EST (PEST) and Premium VOD (PVoD) releases in September 2023, and physical release in October 2023. This amounted to a collective consumer spend of just over £200 per minute on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie across the year, across all visual formats, demonstrating the resonance of content across multiple channels as release windows continue to evolve. Barbie helped Warner Bros. Discovery secure the leading transactional distributor for the second year running, across both physical (30.6% value market share) and digital (19.4% value market share).
Robert Marsh, BASE Chair and Vice President, International Account Management/Sales, and UK Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, said: “Visual entertainment began and remains a content first industry: from premium transactional windows, through digital and disc releases and on to Pay TV and SVOD, our industry exists to create films and TV shows that audiences connect with, and which they return to again and again. With the growth of AVOD and FAST complementing SVOD and transactional, audiences are now able to access our content in more diverse ways than ever before with multi-channel access to entertainment being more and more the norm for many consumers, and particularly fans.”
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