Notes on the method
The pandemic season has affected activities revolving around the audiovisual sector in many ways, also considering that the industry was already undergoing significant changes due to technological innovation and its consequences on the content market in terms of supply and demand.
Business activities related to cinema and television fall entirely within the sphere of cultural and creative industries, and in particular in that subset that produces goods and services with strong symbolic content that guide the process of transformation of large metropolitan economies in advanced tertiary systems for the production of original content with high added value.
The definition and delimitation of the activities within the audiovisual supply chain (like that of the broader cultural and creative industries) are not univocal and often depend on the different sensitivities of a country or a group of economic interests.
Despite this, most groups share the idea that activities linked to the production and distribution of multimedia content for cinema and television play a central role. Despite the high content of technological innovation, audiovisual is one of the cornerstones of our country’s cultural, social, and economic relations.
These simple considerations call for a detailed statistical framework that can etch a positioning of the businesses that fall within the fields of Cinema and Television. What emerges is a specific area that can be defined as the audiovisual industry core, which includes the following activities to the fourth digit of the national classification of economic activities (Ateco 2007):
- 59.11 – Theatrical, video & TV production activities;
- 59.12 – Theatrical, video & TV post-production activities;
- 59.13 – Theatrical, video & TV distribution activities;
- 59.14 – Exhibition activities;
- 60.20 – TV programming and broadcasting activities.
This perimeter was defined starting from a methodological system created by the Symbola Foundation and used within the “I Am Culture” Report. Thanks to this approach, the main industry’s figures and the production structure features are defined sequentially and in detail on a national scale.