News
Rentrak Buys Nielsen's BO Data Outfit EDI
News analysis by Robert Marich-updates with Rentrak's purchase price...
Dec. 15, 2009 -- The movie industry has a merged oracle for box office figures. Today, Renrak Corp. announced it purchased Nielsen EDI, which is the leader in assembling fast and comprehensive box office figures for theatrical releases. The buyer Rentrak (a public company with ticker symbol RENT) is already providing movie studios with DVD rental data for their revenue-sharing deals with home video stores like Blockbuster and online services like Netflix. Rentrak has a box office service that competes with EDI and there will be a merger of services.
“Nielsen EDI, which will be integrated into Rentrak’s AMI division and its Box Office Essentials™ business, captures theatrical box office results from more than 50,000 movie screens in 14 countries,” says a press release for the transaction. “The combination will provide box office results for the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom, covering 90% of the global theatrical box office market.”
Seller Nielsen, which is best known for its ubiquitous Nielsen ratings for TV program viewership, licenses some box office data from EDI/Rentrak under a long term deal.
Notes the book Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition, “Box-office revenue is compiled by Nielsen EDI, Rentrak, BoxOfficeMojo, Exhibitor Relations and Media By Numbers, although admissions (head count or unit ticket sales) are not tracked carefully. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of theaters provide quick, computerized box-office figures. Film distributors take those figures and then estimate the uncounted balance from non-reporting theaters, which typically are low-grossing cinemas without computer equipment. Putting together the two pieces of information provides the initially announced weekend box-office figure, which is partly an estimate. “
EDI provides sophisticated, in-depth data by being able to sort box office by locality and genre, and also deliver in lightning fast time.
EDI, which an acronym for Entertainment Data Inc., has a fascinating history. In 1976, Marcie Polier founded the company to aggregate box office figures, which at the time were assembled by each film company and there was no published industry data. She had worked as a secretary to a film executive and that job required she work the phone to assemble box office data. Polier – who eventually hired her former boss to work for her at EDI – sold EDI to Nielsen for what was believed to be $26 million in 1997. It was an amazing haul for data that was readily available from fragmented sources. She left EDI years ago.
A Rentrak regulatory filing today spells out the purchase price as $15 million and EDI covers more territories today than in 1997.
For full text, click links below
www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/7060236-1.html
www.marketingmovies.net/chapters/chapter-7-distribution-to-theaters/