From the salon indien du grand café to youtube

Since the aesthetic and historical value of motion pictures received universal recognition, films and cinema have been officially considered cultural heritage and therefore worthy of being preserved. Once defined and classified the cinematographicheritage, this Master thesis discusses the issue of its preservation and access within the theoretical framework of cultural economics. More specifically, the research question addressed is: what is the impact of digitalization and the Internet on the cinematographic heritage sector? The paper is divided into two parts. In Part I – in which the main literature is reviewed, ranging from the cultural economy of heritage to the economic analysis of the cultural industries (including issues related to copyright), and from the literature developed within film archival practices to the current debate on digitalization – the topic and the research question are investigated theoretically. At first, a case is made for the definition of a new category of heritage, labelled ‘information heritage’, which differs from both the tangible and the intangible heritage and whose essential attribute is reproducibility. The information heritage comprises all the products of the content industries and (only) within this category digitization equals preservation; as far as films are concerned, however, only their ‘content’ but not their ‘narrative’ can be transferred on new media, hence the authenticity value of a movie’s original negative and prints must be acknowledged. Having outlined the domain of the inquiry, the section continues with the application of the cultural economic theory on heritage to the cinematic sector, with the description of how the world of film preservation is organized (how archives, cinémathèques and film museums operate) and finally with the investigation of the revolutionary changes digital technologies have brought about in the field. The cultural economic analysis of a concrete example of a large-scale film heritage digitization project is also included. Part II, the empirical section of the thesis, researches how the potential power of digitalization is currently used (or not used) in the cinematographic heritage field and in particular how the audiences perceive this new reality. To address those objectives, a survey is designed, organized around a central willingness to pay question. The sample is selected among the users of YouTube who normally watch, upload and/or comment on (parts of) heritage movies on the ever increasingly popular website. The data collected is subsequently analysed both with descriptive statistics and econometrics (logistic regression). The outcome of the survey shows that peer-to-peer networks and online video on demand systems are considered the best ways of delivery of cinematic heritage content, especially in terms of accessibility. The results of the data analysis suggest that this occurs because (for several reasons) cultural institutions do not offer a satisfactory alternative and ignore contemporary audiences’ needs. In the concluding section, further research is recommended into the development of legal alternatives to YouTube and the torrents (that should occur under the supervision of experts), including extensive WTP studies that would help understanding how to maximize the revenue capture potential of the systems and assure their economic sustainability overtime.