Integrated box-office data

Korea’s system, KOBIS, is run by the film council and connects the country’s cinemas into one computerised network that reports each sale as it happens. Admissions by film, by day, by region, nationally, and not compiled from anybody’s press release.

The consequence is political rather than technical. When the Korean industry argues about a quota, a levy or a market share, it argues from figures no participant can dispute, which means the argument is about what to do rather than about whose number is real. An industry without that spends its committee time establishing the facts and runs out of time before it reaches the ask.

Set that against what Level 3 left on the table. There is no accessible authoritative public series in the Philippines for films produced per year, screens by chain and region, admissions, or rates by department, and the country’s largest annual film event declined to publish its own box office during its most recent run. That absence is the tenth problem on the industry list and the only one with nobody’s name against it.

Source: KOFIC’s own site, free at https://www.kofic.or.kr , documents KOBIS as a mandatory integrated real-time ticketing and box-office data system. Compiled in section 1.5, Instrument G of the Hope cases research map, which names it directly as the precedent for a Philippine trusted data layer. The Philippine absence it is being contrasted with is set out in the data gap and in section 11 of the Cinema research map.

First used in: 4.2 · How Korea’s cinema actually got built