Summer home. Six film theatres are experimenting with an extra room online from 4 June. Here's how it works. Suppose you would like to Summer See. The modest but atmospheric coming-of-age drama that earned Sigrid ten Napel a Golden Calf Best Actress nomination. About a summer in which everything changes for a 16-year-old village girl.
But you're out of luck. Your favourite movie theatre is showing Summer well, but just not on that night you had freed up. You used to have bad luck then, yes, but not any more. Now you go to the theatre's website, start the player there, pay the ticket price (eight euros) and watch Summer at home. Also nice when you don't feel like going out again after a busy day.
In a world where strictly separated windows for cinema screening, DVD, VoD, television and so on are the rule, a simultaneous premiere in theatre and online quickly raises eyebrows. But Summer tackles it in a new way.
What is new above all is that for the online screening, the visitor does not have to go to another (thus competing) VoD platform, but simply to the website of the movie theatre itself. Each theatre has installed the player - developed under the supervision of Herrie Film & TV - on its own site. And also shares in the proceeds. For the theatre, it acts as an extra room online. Just like in the real theatre Summer also on view online for a limited number of weeks. There is no intention of building a catalogue for the time being. That, in turn, is a pity.
Herrie sees it not only as an extra service to audiences, but also hopes that small, vulnerable films that are sometimes only programmed a few days a week will now have a better chance of finding audiences. Alex de Ronde of the Amsterdam theatre Het Ketelhuis expects that most of the online viewers would otherwise not have bought a ticket. Extra audience, in other words. Whether this is actually the case remains to be seen.
The Film Research Foundation will survey how viewers interact with the new player. The results will be presented at the Dutch Film Festival in September.
In the meantime, we pick up Summer in house via:
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
