Marc Berry Reid

inreeltime:

With the winners now announced, we take a country-by-country perspective on how the Academy matched global social meda predictions. By looking at the predictions and aspirations of 7 countries, in their native language, we can reveal how each country predicted the ‘Big Four’ awards and how close they were to matching the Academy.

We also analysed conversation during the red carpet and award ceremony to see who were the king and queen of style in the all important fashion stakes.

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We are very proud of this coverage in the Media Monkey section of Media Guardian, for our work on the online PR campaign for ‘NO’. It even gives Way To Blue a shout out!

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Oscar® nominations are a tried and tested route to box office success. But what role does social play in contributing to The Oscar® Bump? We look at which Oscar® nominees are generating the most buzz and what that means for box office sales.

As a marketing tool, there isn’t much…

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Way To Blue is a global communications agency, specialising in Social and PR for the Entertainment Industry. Following the Superbowl yesterday, we analysed all English-language Twitter conversations about the film trailers created for the ad breaks this year, to see which trailers had the…

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Last night the Royal Albert Hall hosted the Royal World Premiere of the 23^rd instalment in the Bond franchise, Skyfall.

This morning, we’ve reviewed a staggering 18,187 tweets mentioning the Skyfall Royal World Premiere, all posted since yesterday. 52.3% of the tweets came from the UK and the…

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This week mobile is all the rage. Fact. Yesterday the iPhone 5 was finally unveiled. Earlier in the week the UK’s largest mobile operator Everything Everywhere unveiled a new consumer brand – “EE” – to coincide with the arrival of superfast mobile internet services on 4G. This product and service…

Barack Obama set a new world record on Twitter last night (well, for politics anyway), with more than 53,000 tweets per minute during his official nomination acceptance speech.  So far, his party is taking gold in the battle of engagement on Twitter with the Democratic National Convention generating a staggering 9 million tweets, more than twice the number generated from Mitt Romney’s Republican gathering last week.

The re-launched Dallas may have proved a big ratings and conversational hit for Channel 5 in the U.K. this week, but in the world of social, data really is the new oil. A New York based analytics firm has developed a smart algorithm enabling brands to serve low cost ads to potential new customers, based on conversation topics from their existing fans, in real time. The really clever part is the data crunching that works out the likely correlation between a brand and a conversation topic. This enables the brand to serve a relevant, timely ad to a potential new customer. This is impressive stuff and could breathe new life into the under-used ‘interest targeting’ tool that Facebook added to the Ad Manager suite just over a year ago.

Since the IPO, Facebook’s ad revenue model has taken quite a battering, mainly due to the low CTRs on Facebook ads. To add to these woes, a report from eMarketer this week suggests that Twitter is likely to earn almost twice the amount of mobile advertising revenue, compared to Facebook this year.  The main driver is the ‘promoted tweet’ product – a huge hit with brands that fits seamlessly into the user experience on mobile devices. Facebook was slower to market with a mobile advertising solution that is more conspicuous and less integrated into the newsfeed on smartphones and tablets

Adoring One Direction fans are helping to keep their favourite band members at the top of the twitpic charts this week with a picture of Niall Horan draped across a pool table reaching more than 15 millions people. Impressive stuff. Personally however, my favourite twitpic of the week is this not-so-innocent rail side poster ad. Genius pole placement.

But back to One Direction. At the MTV VMAs last night the band won an award in the brand new category ‘most share-worthy video’. Votes were collected using Twitter hash tags and voters could view the results in real time. This is the second time the broadcaster has used hash tags as a voting tool. The mechanic was previously used for the MTV Movie Awards in May where the ‘Best Hero’ category attracted almost one million votes via Twitter.

And finally, following in the footsteps of The Muppets and The Avengers, Disney in the U.S. will be using the Google+ platform to debut the trailer for Spielberg’s Lincoln next Thursday (13^th September). The hangout will include the world premiere of the trailer, followed by a live chat with Steven Spielberg and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Fans can apply to join the hangout by submitting a short video to YouTube. The hangout will also be broadcast live in Times Square and all the content will be made available on YouTube immediately afterwards.

With big social buzz around Lincoln already, this is a real coup for Google’s social platform and technology. They will be expecting the event to increase awareness, visibility and usage of Google+. It also marks the very first time that a studio has debuted a movie trailer on their social platform and assuming success, other studios are likely to follow suit.

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Now the dust has settled, which films generated the most buzz during Comic-Con?

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THE WTB TEAM THAT HELPED THE AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! It’s been a long time coming but THE AVENGERS is finally in cinemas this weekend. Thanks to all our journos for helping make this one hell of a campaign. We’ve loved every minute of it. And breathe……

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Marvel’s Avengers Assemble UK premiere pre-buzz (over 48 hours) is off the Twichter scale!  It doubles that of even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which previously showed the highest level of conversation around a UK Premiere that we have ever seen. 

26 competitions were run with leading sites for tickets on Twitter.  

So, will you be at Vue Shepherd’s Bush, Westfield tonight?

inreeltime:

The Hunger Games has become Lionsgate’s highest-grossing movie ever, but how much noise has it made on Twitter compared to the more established movie franchises of Twilight and Harry Potter?

According to our research, it has had 2.9 million tweets in the past week – setting the standard for film buzz on twitter. From the above visual you can see at its most talked about peak it’s beaten Harry Potter.

It will be interesting to see how The Avengers and other summer blockbusters fare against this, but for now it remains the teenage top tweeting title.

inreeltime:

Check out this awesome digital poster for Lionsgate’s The Cabin in the Woods. We wanted to take quotes from bloggers and key sites given we knew everyone who saw this movie would love it. We then pushed out in the UK and have seen incredible results with key US sites such as Joblo picking it up too.

Review

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/04/poster-lab-the-cabin-in-the-woods/

“In one quick reworking of a striking image, it’s delivered its logo and endorsements all in one.”

Originally posted on Mashable….

Practically since the birth of television, consumers have enjoyed watching feature-length movies at home. In the early years, movie studios worried that television broadcasts would cannibalize cineplex ticket sales. In time, however, studios learned that home viewing not only didn’t have a substantial impact on box office sales — the home video market could thrive as an additional source of revenue.

Today, consumers can watch movies at home in any number of ways, including through disc rental, digital download, subscription streaming, digital rental and even disc or digital purchase. Market research firm Mintel published a report in May 2011 that takes a closer look at movie consumption at home.

Consumers Are Shifting From Owning to Renting/Subscribing

The home video market — that is, the market for home video or digital purchases and rentals — has been in decline for the last six years.

Mintel reports that sales have dropped 13% between 2006 and 2010 and that the decline has accelerated over the last two years. Revenues declined in 2009 and 2010, even as the number of transactions for pre-recorded content was on the increase.

That revenue decline shows that consumers are slowly but surely moving away from a “buy to own” market and finding more value in rentals. Even as traditional video stores like Blockbuster have languished, rent-by-mail andrental kiosk business models have continued to thrive.

Digital is Slowly Replacing Physical Discs

While physical discs still rule, consumers are slowly but surely moving into the realm of digital downloads and digital streaming.

Although digitally distributed movies (not including streaming) grew by 5.7 market-share points between 2008 and 2010, that still represented just 13.3% of home video entertainment spending in 2010.

To combat the decline of disc sales, movie studios frequently package digital versions of a film alongside the physical DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Disruptive Rental Models Challenge Studios

When the home video market started to decline in 2005 and 2006, the major movie studios were caught off-guard. For nearly a decade, home video sales — and home video ownership — were continuing to increase.

When the DVD boom in the late 1990s hit the market, movie studios were able to get out from under the various rental agreements that plagued home VHS sales. In other words, rather than selling a VHS tape to Blockbuster for $119.99 (which was once the high price of first access to new rental releases), and then, some months later, sell a cheaper home video release, studios found that they could sell the discs to customers for just $14 or $15 a piece.

As the DVD era ended, however, the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD as the successor format to DVD caused many customers to put off upgrading their technology and gave digital downloads and distribution an opportunity to gain ground. When Blu-ray finally was declared the winning format, for many customers, it was too late.

Studios hope to gain the upper-hand in the future with Ultra Violet, a new cloud-based delivery model that will allow customers to access their digital purchases from multiple devices and locations, without needing the physical disc.

Consumers Love Streaming

More than digital downloads, digital and subscription streaming has had a profound impact on how consumers watch movies. According to Mintel, 25% of adult respondents (with Internet access) have a Netflix subscription, and 88% of those users use the streaming library.

Keep in mind, this survey took place before Netflix raised its prices and separated its streaming and rental properties, but the fact that 1 in 4 adults subscribe to the service underscores the popularity of streaming as a business model and consumption habit.

TV and Premium Cable Still Matter

Of course, the most popular way to watch movies remains through broadcast television and cable. According to Mintel, 67% of its surveyed users said they watched a movie via cable or broadcast TV in the last two weeks. In second place, 44% of users said they watched a movie via a premium cable network like HBO and in third place, 38% said they rented a physical disc.

Perhaps the more interesting takeaway is that consumers frequently watched content associated with a flat monthly rate. That means that whether it was via an HBO subscription or via a Netflix streaming account, users were more likely to watch content on a subscription basis, as opposed to an a la carte basis.

Mintel’s report was completed before HBO rolled out HBO Go, the first widely available TV Everywhere initiative. HBO Go has been tremendously effective, in part because it builds on two of the hottest trends amongst consumers: subscription streaming and watching premium cable content.

With membership and traffic plummeting of late, Facebook have made some major changes which impact brands and consumers alike. The response, as with any change Facebook make, has been audibly ‘meh’ but there’s some useful benefits for brands.

Wired magazine described the changes by saying, “Facebook’s vision of the future involves bringing its users entirely into its social platform, allowing for the Facebook page to be a sort of one-stop shop.”  This is precisely what makes Vkontakte the social network with the highest penetration of daily usage - 63% of users log on daily compared to Facebook’s 58%. Why? So they can watch and listen (illegally) to films and music.

The most important bonus for brands might be in new-found visibility. Facebook via a default setting will only show you the pages and stories which you interact with most –  since people look to interact with friends first on Facebook, those posts are most likely to show up as Top Stories in the new design, meaning brand pages dissapear from newsfeeds if they do not receive any interaction. The new ticker allows businesses whose posts only reach 20% of their fans to now reach them all. Facebook have now also added per-post impression data so brands can track engagement performance more precisely so they don’t slip off newsfeeds. What is most apparent is that brands will have to be more relevant to fans than ever.

Gestures will allow brands to spread their own framing of their content they want and perhaps even make their own dialect become a social meme. As Mumbrella points out, Facebook believes that users are not entirely comfortable clicking ‘Like’.  More people will share more things if the button they click doesn’t imply personal endorsement. Mashable also points out, “More people will click a button that says they’ve ‘Listened’ to a song or ‘Watched’ a video, rather than simply liking it. From Facebook’s F8 conference onwards, developers will have the power to create their own actions/buttons.

The new Timeline pages allow a user to feature any content – videos, photos or other updates – in reverse chronological order. Timeline transforms the list of status messages and comments into a scrapbook of a user’s entire Facebook history.  Brand timeline pages will eventually arrive but for now we’ll have to learn how they change the behaviour of consumers, and give them the tools and cues to create brand timelines for us.

AllFacebook believe that in the short term, creating an app on the platform is the best way to benefit from the new changes as for now, pages can only dream about the level of social integration with Facebook’s new products that Spotify and others have achieved.

Brands which don’t powerfully and frequently engage fans will inevitably lose visibility in a user’s main newsfeed, relegated to the ticker and barely visible on the homepage, meaning that Facebook may see some ad revenue benefits from desperate brands from all the changes. But it’d be cynical to think that was wholly the reason for the changes, right?

Facebook will make a tonne from behavioural ads now that users can share what they are consuming (videos, news, music) through media partner applications.  This means marketers can get mentions and gain them wider distribution through sponsored stories

Here are the other changes:

1. Posts can now be as long as 5,000 characters – ten times the previous maximum length.
2. You can no longer accompany a friend request with a message.
3. Part or all of the navigation bar will remain on-screen even when you scroll down the page.
4. You can create bookmarks, label favourites, in the left-hand column.
5. Birthday reminders appear in the upper-right side, near where you see poke notifications.
6. Friend lists that existed before the new smart list prompts have an entirely new management interface.
7. The poke button has become a link tucked into a pull-down to the right of the add friend button.
8. A thumbnail image of the user, and his or her name, appears in the right-hand corner of the top blue navigation bar. When one surfs the site using a page alias, the name and main image appears in the same place.

This was an article Mashable posted last week on social media’s impact on movie marketing. Nothing ground-breaking but some good examples of recent successful campaigns.

From self-funded independent projects to big-name Hollywood blockbusters, the movie industry has embraced social media. Big time.

Historically, of course, this makes a lot of sense. Classical Hollywood had the star system and fan magazines. Modern Hollywood has Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones.

From creating viral alternate reality campaigns to using social networks to build awareness, the movie industry is busy leveraging social media to connect with fans and promote its products.

Let’s look at some of the ways that social media is having an impact on movie marketing and promotion.

Crowd-sourced Screening Locations

In the world of the multiplex and billion dollar plus box office receipts, it’s easy to forget that not every film comes to every theater. Even films that ultimately go on to make a lot of money at the box office — like 2009’sPrecious — often start out in only a few cities.

The traditional marketing strategy for these films has been to expand to more and more markets as word of mouth, press and publicity propel the films forward. In the age of social media, however, studios can use theInternet to figure out where an interest in the film exists.

One of the best examples of this strategy was for Paramount’s Paranormal Activity. The film, which was made for less than $15,000 went on to gross more than $150 million at the box office.

Paramount extensively used Facebook to promote the film, partnering with Eventful to get would-be fans to request a screening of the film in their area. The goal was to get 1 million fan requests for the film to enter wide release. That goal was met pretty quickly, but the real proof came via the box office receipts.

MGM also used Eventful to have fans request screenings of its comedy, Hot Tub Time Machine.

The cool thing about this strategy is that it lets fans have a sense of ownership of the film. It also creates a level of awareness and connection that you might not get just with running radio or TV spots.

Going Viral

One of my favorite marketing trends of the past decade has been the rise of viral alternate reality campaigns, especially at the movies.

Thanks to social media, elements of these campaigns can get really intricate and really involved. For Inception, Warner Bros. did a lot of viral marketing — including working with the location-based service SCVNGR to promote the film.

For Toy Story 3, Disney and Pixar went all out, creating vintage toy commercials for Lots-o’Huggin’ Bear, one of the new characters in the film.

Perhaps the most impressive — and expansive — campaign has been that of TRON: Legacy. Disney’s alternate reality campaign started in earnest in July 2009, just in time for Comic-Con. The film hits theaters on December 17, 2010.

Trailers & Poster Promotions

It used to be that you had to go to the theater to see the trailers for the next batch of upcoming films. Then TV shows dedicated to showcasing previews hit the scene. While watching movie previews online has been old-hat for more than a decade, the rise of social media has changed how information gets exposed to fans.

Sure, movie studios still send out press releases and have special websites that news sites and blogs can access to get the latest scoop, but more and more studios are taking to Facebook and Twitter to debut their latest trailers.

Again, Disney gets props in this department. The studio used Facebook to debut its first character posters from Alicein Wonderland and has also used Facebook to show off movie trailers.

The irony that Sony couldn’t use Facebook to directly promote The Social Network didn’t mean the studio had to abstain from social media. On the contrary, the studio was able to use Twitter, MySpaceand its own social-themed site to promote the film.

The Age of the Facebook App

Facebook is a great avenue for marketers and brands to connect with consumers and would-be customers. For movie studios, Facebook also offers a way to engage audiences and even directly sell tickets.

Disney created a Facebook app for TRON: Legacy called the TRONiVerse. The app is still active; it pulls in posts, videos and photos from various social networks, displaying them in an interactive grid. This is just one example of a studio building an app specifically for a film.

Fox had a pretty in-depth Facebook campaign for Avatar, including apps and promotional tie-ins. Disney even offered movie tickets for Toy Story 3 via its Facebook Page, as pictured above.

Likewise, Sony has created its own in-house ticketing app for many of its films. The great thing about buying movie tickets via Facebook is that you can invite friends along with you.

The Future

We expect to see the movie industry embrace social media even more in the future. A look at some of the biggest hits at the box office this year proves that many of the most successful films also had strong social media campaigns.

25 years ago VHS beat Betamax as the format of choice for film home entertainment. 13 years later DVD beat Laserdisc. 10 years later Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD.  That was only 3 years ago now and Hollywood had already begun debating and developing the next ‘format’ for home entertainment. Coinciding with this year’s CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), a number of articles have begun surfacing about what’s next.

What filmmakers think of Blu-ray…. (from Engadget)

Panasonic took a break from its usual CES business this afternoon to host the inaugural directors’ panel at the show (in conjunction with 20th Century Fox), where the unexpected trio of Oliver Stone, Michael Mann and Baz Luhrmann showed up to talk about technology in Hollywood, and Blu-ray in particular. As you might expect, the general theme was that Blu-ray is great, but the directors certainly weren’t shy to make their opinions known. While Mann said that Blu-ray would be the “premier format for six, seven or eight years,” for instance, he also took a moment to reminisce about the photochemical process used on Last of the Mohicans, which he notes still can’t be fully replicated on Blu-ray. Luhrmann also talked at length about the great colors Blu-ray allows, and stated simply that “it’s better,” before picking a fight with a noisy booth next door.

Oliver Stone was unsurprisingly the most opinionated, however, and lamented the fact that Blu-ray will be “last hardware” in the face of digital distribution. He even suggested that people should “be different, go against the grain” and collect Blu-rays, which he says will be very valuable by 2050 or so in much the way comics and baseball cards are today. On a more general note, Stone also said that watching kids try to watch a movie on a computer screen and multitask so much these days is “very depressing to me” and that, in a way, “we are the last of the Mohicans.” (Video available here)

I first heard about ‘Ultraviolet’ when I went to a Yahoo! research event a couple of months back as part of Internet Week Europe. It was interesting to read more about it today in an article on CNET which I have summarised below…

A group of stakeholders in the entertainment industry are poised to make a important sales pitch to consumers concerning the way they buy and watch movies and TV shows.

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Netflix, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Best Buy are among the members of a consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, which has come up with a set of standards and specifications designed to make approved digital content playable on certified devices. DECE calls the technology UltraViolet.

“The DVD was the most successful consumer product launch ever in history…it was an open platform, meaning their was one standard, every manufacturer made it, all the content on the planet was available for it. We don’t see that model currently.

–Barry McCarthy, former Netflix CFO

DECE announced this evening at the 2011 CES in Las Vegas that it expects companies that have licensed UltraViolet to begin rolling out products and services beginning this summer. DECE said it expects UltraViolet will appear in the United Kingdom and Canada later in the year. If you believe that the DVD and physical media are in their twilight years, then UltraViolet’s backers appear to be laying the groundwork for the next home-video format.

The pitch from UltraViolet’s supporters goes something like this: users could acquire what are essentially lifetime rights to movies and shows. The rights to certain content could be easily transferred from one service provider to another if the owner chooses to switch or if one the services closes down. Owners wouldn’t have to fear losing or breaking their movies anymore because all the material would live in the cloud and be accessible via Web-connected TVs, handhelds, computers, and set-top boxes. DECE said families who use UltraViolet “will be able to create an account for up to six members who can access the household’s UltraViolet movies, TV and other entertainment…consumers will also be able to register up to 12 devices” so UltraViolet content can be easily downloaded to those devices or shared between them.”

But here’s the rub: the content will be swaddled in digital rights management, software designed to prevent unauthorized copying. While DECE played up the number of accounts and devices UltraViolet users will have access to, critics will likely scoff. Expect many from the tech sector to accuse UltraViolet’s makers of trying to lock up consumers’ content–again.

Naysayers have argued that the Internet helped consumers seize control of media by enabling them to share digital films, music, and books as many times as they want and play it on whatever devices they want. Michael Robertson, the longtime technology entrepreneur who founded pioneering music service MP3.com and has worked with digital lockers for nearly a decade, is among UltraViolet’s doubters.

“I think the era of trying to cram formats and standards down the throats of consumers is over,” Robertson said. “When we live in a world where users are one click way from BitTorrent and from obtaining a high-quality film copy that can be played on any device, I don’t see UltraViolet, with its restrictions and limitations, winning consumers back. Consumers just have too much power.”

Mitch Singer, chief technology officer at Sony Pictures, a DECE member, says there is no conspiracy to snatch away control from consumers. He said UltraViolet is a way to make digital movies and TV shows more appealing by making them as simple to view, store, and transfer as the DVD. He notes history has shown that the lack of open standards only hurts consumers.

“If every brick-and-mortar retailer would have had their own [DVD] format that wouldn’t have made any sense at all,” Singer said. “But digital rolled out exactly that way. It rolled out in a series of fragmented silos.”

This wasn’t unprecedented. Singer said plenty of innovative products debuted this way, but then quickly changed.

“Xerox fax machines in the early days could only fax documents if the machine on the other side was Xerox,” Singer said. “ATM machines would only give money to cardholders who belonged to the same network…but over time if you want to see any substantial growth you have to open it up.”

Barry McCarthy, Netflix’s CFO the past decade until leaving the company last month, predicted two years ago there would be a need to create standards for the Web distribution of movies and he suggested the plan would be modeled after the DVD.

“The DVD was the most successful consumer product launch ever in history measured in terms of growth in the number of units in U.S. homes,” McCarthy told the Unofficial Stanford blog in 2008. “It was five years to 50 percent household penetration and it was an open platform, meaning their was one standard, every manufacturer made it…all the content on the planet was available for it. We don’t see that model currently [in Web distribution of movies]. Apple has a device…but it only talks to the Apple Web site. It doesn’t talk to Amazon. It doesn’t talk to the Netflix site…And if there’s a Netflix device that we make or someone makes for us that runs the Netflix application that gets you to a Netflix Web site, it’s only going to talk to our Website. In a perfect world, there would be open platforms.”

Robertson said the UltraViolet effort looks very much like PlaysForSure, the DRM certification program that Microsoft tried to establish for devices and content services in 2004. It failed to take off. Josh Martin was one of those who were critical of PlaysForSure but the mobile and video analyst for research group Strategy Analytics argues UltraViolet is a superior strategy.

“I think the era of trying to cram formats and standards down the throats of consumers is over.”

–Michael Robertson, entrepreneur

Martin said UltraViolet could work because the key players appear to have learned from past mistakes.

Martin wrote in October that under UltraViolet’s plan, content “is not locked to a specific device but to a user (or a family of users).” He said that this means users can transfer content to a wide array of devices and that makes UltraViolet content more flexible than the DVD.

The most important difference between Ultraviolet and PlaysForSure, according to Martin, is that UltraViolet supports various DRM schemes and either “changes the DRM ‘wrapper’ when a file is transferred between devices,” Martin wrote, “or allows a user to download a new file that is suitable for that specific device (i.e. you wouldn’t want to transfer a 1080p file to your phone). This increases utility while reducing end user complexity.”

The other big knock on UltraViolet is that Apple and Disney haven’t signed on. How can a standards agreement be any good if consumers aren’t able to watch movies from one of the most important film studios or play content obtained from iTunes?

Singer, said UltraViolet movies and TV shows will be available on theiPad and iPhone because those devices are compatible with an app created by Netflix, an UltraViolet partner. But Singer concedes video purchased from iTunes currently won’t play on UltraViolet devices.

About the absence of Disney, Martin said “In order for consumers to believe in this technology, all major content owners must be on board and as of today they are not.”

Personally I think it is a shame to see the death of Blu-ray this soon. There is still the hunter / gatherer in many of us and there is nothing better than looking at a bookcase packed with a movie collection you have built over many years. However the rapid growth of digital media, and the various conflicting digital formats that come with it, needs to be solved sooner rather than later. Maybe ‘Ultraviolet’ is the answer, but only if ALL stakeholders play nicely. And when has that ever happened before?

Posted today on the Hollywood Reporter….

Thank Harry Potter and the Na’vi warriors. Time Warner and News Corp., home to thePotter franchise and Avatar, respectively, ran the studio units with the highest operating profits in 2010. They also recorded the biggest filmed-entertainment revenue out of all the media conglomerates.

That’s according to a THR analysis of financial statements of the five publicly traded entertainment giants with filmed-entertainment operations. (Because NBCUniversal doesn’t break out this figure for its studio unit, the company is excluded here.)

In line with their size, the operating profits of Time Warner’s and News Corp.’s filmed-entertainment units also contributed a higher percentage to total company profit than their peers. Those contributions range from just a few percentage points in the case of Viacom and its Paramount Pictures to 23.9 percent in the case of News Corp. and Fox.

TIME WARNER The company’s filmed-entertainment unit, which CEO Jeff Bewkeshas in recent years lauded for making a hit-and-miss business predictable and consistent, recorded operating profit for 2010 that was nearly unchanged from a record 2009 — down only 1 percent when using adjusted operating income.

NEWS CORP. Narrowly edged by Time Warner, News Corp.’s creative factory saw its operating profit drop 8 percent despite Avatar’s record-breaking box-office run, most of which fell into 2010. “Our film studio has not had a year to remember, but that’s the nature of the business,” News Corp.’s Chase Carey said during his company’s most recent earnings call about the performance of the Fox studio.

DISNEY Having posted declines in overall studio-unit profits for 2009, Disney was one of only two sector giants to record gains in the bottom line of its creative-output divisions last year. Not coincidentally, Disney released two billion-dollar grossing films in 2010: Alice in Wonderlandand Toy Story 3.

SONY After Disney, Sony made the second-biggest gain with a 57% jump thanks to such hits as its top movie in 2010, The Karate Kid, and the highly profitable Resident Evil: Afterlife, which benefited from international demand for higher-priced 3D fare, as well as strength at international TV channels that are part of Sony’s film unit.

VIACOM After showing the biggest profitability improvement in 2009 in percentage terms, Viacom’s Paramount reported a 57 percent decrease in 2010 operating profits at the studio unit. The lower upside of its business distributing other studios’ titles has historically been a drag on the studio’s margins. Tony Wible, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, believes Viacom might also be feeling the effects of not imposing a 28-day delay on delivering movies to Redbox and Netflix, even though management has said the decision has been good business.

Analysts cite weaker high-margin home-entertainment revenue — and a shift from DVD sales to lower-margin rentals — as one key factor in some studio units’ lower profitability last year.

Matthew Lieberman, a director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ entertainment, media and communications practice, says 2010 “really was a mixed bag for studios,” with fewer franchise releases and flat theatrical attendance. The profit data doesn’t come as a surprise to Wall Street experts, who say that studio units tend to be among the least profitable businesses at media conglomerates and typically contribute less to overall profitability and valuation than cable-TV-networks divisions, which often contribute two-thirds of total profits.

The data also prove that U.S. box-office market-share rankings don’t say much about profitability. Case in point: Viacom’s Paramount came in second among owners of the big studios in market share but last in profit.