The European Commission's review of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive 2010/13/EU, as amended by Directive (EU) 2018/1808) has reopened one of the most consequential — and most fragmented — debates in EU digital policy: how, and how much, on-demand streaming services should be compelled to finance European audiovisual works. Five years after the 2020 transposition deadline, the answer from Member States has been a patchwork of national obligations that imposes real costs on cross-border services and, increasingly, on the European production ecosystem the rules were designed to support.
One Directive, Many Decrees
Article 13 of the revised AVMSD does two things. It requires on-demand catalogues to dedicate at least a 30% share to European works and ensure their prominence. And, crucially, it allows Member States to impose financial-contribution obligations on services targeting their territory, even when those services are established elsewhere in the EU — a deliberate derogation from the country-of-origin principle that has otherwise underpinned the single market for audiovisual services since the original 1989 Television Without Frontiers Directive.
The implementations that have proliferated since 2021 illustrate just how much room that derogation leaves:
- France moved earliest and hardest. The SMAD decree (n° 2021-793 of 22 June 2021) requires Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Paramount+ to invest between 20% and 25% of their net French revenue in French and European audiovisual works, under the supervision of Arcom. France has signed individual agreements (conventions) with the major streamers translating the decree into operational commitments.
- Italy transposed AVMSD through the Tusma decree (D.Lgs. 208/2021), enforced by AGCOM, layering investment obligations and catalogue quotas onto on-demand services. Streamers have challenged aspects of the regime before the Consiglio di Stato, with administrative litigation still working its way through the system.
- Spain set a 5% investment obligation under Article 117 of Ley 13/2022 (General Law on Audiovisual Communication). Netflix and other platforms challenged the measure before the Tribunal Supremo, arguing it conflicts with the country-of-origin principle and is disproportionate when applied to services established in other Member States.
Add Germany's Filmabgabe levy and similar measures in Belgium, Portugal, and the Nordics, and a single streaming service operating across the EU now navigates a dozen overlapping regimes, each with its own definition of "European work", its own qualifying-revenue rules, and its own enforcement authority.
The Cost of Fragmentation
The pro-cultural intent behind Article 13 is legitimate: independent European producers genuinely face structural disadvantages against deep-pocketed global studios, and audiovisual diversity is a recognised public-interest objective in EU law. But the way the derogation has been used cuts directly against the single-market logic that makes pan-European streaming services viable in the first place.
Three problems stand out. First, duplicative compliance. A service operating in twenty-seven markets must run twenty-seven reporting regimes, often with different fiscal-year definitions and audit standards. That is overhead the EU was supposed to eliminate, not compound. Second, investment misallocation. Mandatory national quotas push capital toward whichever production system happens to qualify under whichever decree applies — not necessarily toward the most ambitious or exportable European projects. Third, legal uncertainty. The pending Spanish Supreme Court proceedings and Italian administrative litigation show that the country-of-origin question is genuinely unsettled, and a Court of Justice referral on the proportionality of stacked national obligations is increasingly likely.
What a Proportionate Review Looks Like
The Commission's evaluation, feeding into the Media Outlook workstream and running alongside the European Media Freedom Act implementation, is an opportunity to converge rather than escalate. A sensible package would:
- Set a harmonised ceiling on financial-contribution obligations — a single EU-wide cap on the percentage of national revenue any Member State can require, with a clear methodology for what counts as qualifying revenue and what counts as a European work.
- Restore the country-of-origin principle as the default, allowing targeting-based obligations only where a service derives a substantial and durable share of revenue from a specific Member State — and only above that threshold.
- Mutual recognition of investment across Member States, so a euro spent on a qualifying European co-production counts toward obligations everywhere it streams, not only where the producer happens to be based.
- Resist expansion of the regime to advertising-funded streamers and FAST channels until the economics of those services — which differ sharply from subscription VOD — are properly studied.
The point of the single market is that a service compliant in one Member State is compliant everywhere. Article 13's derogation was meant to be the exception; in practice, it has become the rule.
Culture Is Worth Supporting; Fragmentation Isn't
Nothing in a pro-innovation stance requires opposing public support for European audiovisual culture. The European production sector has produced some of the most successful global streaming hits of the past five years, and the appetite for non-Anglophone content is structural, not cyclical. But the way to sustain that momentum is harmonised, predictable rules — not a competitive race among Member States to impose the highest quotas on the same handful of platforms. The Commission's review should treat AVMSD Article 13 less as a tool of cultural protectionism and more as what it was supposed to be: a narrowly-targeted exception inside a functioning single market.