Q Cinema 

Monetising Research-led Public Engagement at the Showroom Cinema

Partners

• Showroom Workstation

Funders

• The University of Sheffield's Research Enterprise Innovation Fund

Project Team

• Melanie Crawley (Showroom Workstation)
• David Forrest (School of English)
• Natalie Hammond (Dept of Sociological Studies)
• Michael Meredith (Humanities Research Institute)
• Michael Pidd (Humanities Research Institute)
• Colin Pons (Studio of the North)
• Masoud Rajabi (Dept of Sociological Studies)
• Bridgette Wessels (Dept of Sociological Studies)
• Ian Wild (Showroom Workstation)

Overview

Q Cinema is a collaborative project between Sheffield's Showroom Cinema and the Humanities Research Institute which will combine technology and high quality academic research in order to generate additional economic value from the cinema's existing content and programming.

The project seeks to understand whether or not visitors would be prepared to use their mobile phones before, during or after screenings in order to access additional content in return for a micropayment. As part of this research the project will identify which types of content are of interest to visitors, how much they are willing to pay and effective points-of-sale (for example, using a mobile phone to scan a QR Code which is projected onto the cinema screen at the end of a film).

The project is funded by the University of Sheffield's Research Enterprise Innovation Fund and is being undertaken by early career researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Faculty of Social Sciences who have expertise in developing consumer-oriented content and assessing the economics of public engagement.