Value of the content and value of the channel: movie rerun on television

Despite the role that movie reruns play in television programming, few studies have been devoted to this topic. In this paper I explore the performance determinants of reruns relying on data from Italian television industry, but several industry interviews suggested that the conclusions can be significant also for other countries at least in the European landscape. I use a database of 1123 film broadcast by major Italian tv channel more than one time from 1996 to 2005. Second reruns get on average a 60% of the first run audience, while the third rerun drop to 45%. I regress rerun tv audience outcome on several independent variables as the attendance in movie theatres, movie genre, country of production, results of previous run, temporal gap between runs, share of tv network on which the movie in broadcasting the transmission month.Results show a statistically significant negative relation with temporal gap of transmission and a positive relation with the audience of first run, the strength of the channel at the time of transmission and the promotional activity related with the first release in movie theatres.