DESPITE CRISES, NORTHERN FILM INDUSTRY MAINTAINS POSITIVE OUTLOOK ON THE FUTURE

What’s the situation for the film and media industries in Northern Germany? Within the framework of the EU project Cross Motion, the Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein conducted a representative study among some 1,400 companies active in the audio-visual industries. And the results? With a total turnover of 3.2 million euros and 14,500 jobs, the audio-visual industry is an important economic factor in the region. Two out of three TV producers and about three-fourths of the region’s film producers are expecting increasing returns into the year 2020, despite the fact that only about 20% of those asked consider their current economic situation as satisfactory. But even on the job market the outlook remains positive: more than a third of the audio-visual companies are planning to hire additional personnel in 2017. And one-fourth of the filmmakers are concentrating in the future on online-video, while every eighth company is planning to branch out into the fields of virtual and augmented reality.