A four-year-old bill nears the finish line
On August 3, 2026, the Brazilian Congress's Conselho de Comunicação Social (CCS) approved Recommendation CCS 2/2026, endorsing a tiered tax structure for PL 2.331/2022 — the bill that extends CONDECINE, the Contribuição para o Desenvolvimento da Indústria Cinematográfica Nacional, to video-on-demand and streaming platforms (Senado Notícias). Authored by Senator Nelsinho Trad (PSD-MS), the bill cleared the Senate's Economic Affairs Committee unanimously in November 2023, spent over a year in the Chamber of Deputies, and has now returned to the Senate with a substitute text awaiting a full floor vote (Câmara dos Deputados; Senado, matéria 154545).
The CCS's core recommendation is a choice between two competing tax architectures. The Chamber's substitute proposed a progressive scale running from 0.5% to 4% for VOD platforms and a separate, lower band of 0.1% to 0.8% for user-generated-content services. The council rejected that model, warning it invited tax avoidance through revenue reclassification, and instead urged the Senate to restore its own original revenue-banded structure: platforms earning up to R$4.8 million a year are exempt, those between R$4.8 million and R$96 million pay 1.5%, and those above R$96 million pay the full 3% (Poder360). Platforms with catalogs that are at least half Brazilian-produced content get a 75% CONDECINE discount. The recommendation now goes to Senate President Davi Alcolumbre and rapporteur Eduardo Gomes for scheduling (TeleTime).
The steelman case for taxing streaming like cinema
Brazil has taxed theatrical exhibition and pay-TV to fund national film production for decades through CONDECINE and the Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual. As streaming has displaced both distribution channels, the argument for extending the same levy is straightforward: if Netflix and Globoplay now do the job cinemas and cable once did, exempting them from the industry-development contribution those incumbents still pay creates an unlevel playing field and starves the same production ecosystem those platforms depend on for local content. The revenue-banded structure the CCS backed is also the more defensible of the two options on the table — a flat, predictable schedule is genuinely harder to game than the Chamber's four-tier progressive curve, and exempting the roughly R$4.8 million floor shields small Brazilian streamers and niche services from a tax designed for platforms operating at national scale. Regional earmarks in the underlying bill — 30% of proceeds reserved for the North, Northeast and Center-West, 20% for the South plus Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais, and 10% for the interior of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — also respond to a legitimate complaint that Brazil's screen industry has historically clustered around Rio and São Paulo.
Where the analogy breaks down
The problem is what counts as a streaming platform under this framework. Coverage of the bill has consistently named YouTube and Twitch alongside Netflix and Prime Video as covered services, and the Chamber's now-rejected substitute explicitly carved out a separate, lower band for user-generated content precisely because UGC platforms don't commission or curate national-content catalogs the way VOD services do — they host what users upload. By steering the Senate back toward a single revenue-tiered schedule without preserving that distinction, the CCS recommendation risks taxing a live-streaming or video-sharing platform on the same terms as a studio-backed VOD library, even though it has no catalog to fill with Brazilian productions and no meaningful way to hit the bill's separately debated content quotas — 10% in the Senate's original text, 20% over seven years in the Chamber's version. A subsidy mechanism built for an industry of curated titles doesn't map cleanly onto platforms whose entire catalog is user-generated and unbounded.
This is the recurring failure mode of applying legacy media-subsidy tools to internet platforms: the tax base is easy to define (gross revenue), but the policy logic — content quotas, catalog discounts, credentialing by ANCINE — assumes a curator that some covered platforms simply aren't. Brazil isn't alone in this; the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive imposes a 30% European-content quota on VOD catalogs, and the debate there over whether user-upload platforms belong in the same regime is unresolved too. Brazil should take the win the CCS got right — a simple, avoidance-resistant revenue schedule with a real small-business exemption — while pressing the Senate to keep a narrower definition of what a "streaming platform" is before the bill reaches the floor. A tax regime built for curated catalogs, bolted onto platforms that don't curate, will produce years of ANCINE enforcement disputes rather than the funding stability the bill is meant to deliver.