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National Theatre Beams Helen Mirren Live on Cinema Screens Worldwide
On Thursday 25 June the National Theatre will be broadcasting live the NYLive! production of Phedre, starring Helen Mirren, to 60 cinema screens across the UK and a further 170 worldwide.
NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) is part-funding NTLive! as part of a series of work to find ways that digital technologies can support traditional arts. Projects such as NTLive! bring together old-world and new-world forms of entertainment with potentially powerful results that have both a cultural and economic benefit to the UK.
As this week's Digital Britain report highlighted, the creative industries and digital technologies will play a key role in the growth of the future UK economy. Currently, the creative industries make up 6.4% of the UK economy and has been growing at 4% a year (the UK has the largest creative sector in the world relative to GDP). Including those working in related creative occupations, the creative economy employs just under two million people in the UK. Within this, just over 1.1 million are employed in the creative industries themselves.
NESTA forecasts that the creative industries in the UK will grow on average by 4% over the next five years (more than double the rate of the rest of the economy), generating £85bn to GDP (up from £59 billion). By 2013, the sector is expected to employ 1.3million people, a figure likely to be more than the financial sector. By 2013, there may be as many as 180,000 creative businesses in the sector, compared to the current 148,000.
However, It is estimated that if the creative sector does not get up to speed in its transition to digital markets, the UK economy stands to lose an annual £6bn in value added by 2013.
The reason for the optimistic medium-term outlook is primarily due to the high levels of the UK's creative talent and opportunities for innovation, partly as increasing numbers of creative businesses take advantage of digital technologies to develop new business models and NTLive! Is a great example of this.
Jon Kingsbury, director of the Creative Economy Programme at NESTA, says: "Developments in digital technology mean that audiences are increasingly consuming content in different ways. Bringing National Theatre productions to audiences in cinemas across the world has the potential to unlock new revenue streams for the creative economy as well as bringing world-class cultural experiences to a wider audience."
19th June 2009
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