On 2 May 2026, France's audiovisual regulator Arcom confirmed that Amazon Prime Video must invest at least €90 million (~$105.8m) in French-language and European content during 2026 — a figure that climbs to €110 million if Amazon agrees to shorten the delay between a film's cinema release and its appearance on the platform. That is more than double the €40 million obligation set when France first brought streamers inside its financing regime in 2021. The mechanism is France's décret SMAD (Decree No. 2021-793 of 22 June 2021), the national transposition of the European Union's 2018 Audiovisual Media Services Directive.
The steelman: ending a genuine asymmetry
Before 1 July 2021, Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+ could sell subscriptions to French households while contributing nothing to the French and European production ecosystem that linear broadcasters had funded for decades. The SMAD decree ended that asymmetry by requiring on-demand services to commit roughly 20–25% of their French turnover to audiovisual and cinematographic works, with catalogue quotas of 60% European and 40% original-French-language titles.
This is not a regime the platforms have defied. Global streamers invested more than $1.02 billion (€974.6m) in French film and television between 2021 and the end of 2023, according to figures reported from France's National Film Centre (CNC). Prime Video alone accounted for roughly 32% of that spending. Apple TV+ voluntarily signed up in January 2025, agreeing to direct 20% of its French net turnover into European and French works, 70% of it to independent producers. The strongest case for the regime is simply that it works on its own terms: it has channelled real money to independent French producers who retain their intellectual property, without driving a single major platform out of the market.
Where proportionality starts to strain
The number that should give pause is not the €90 million floor. It is the €20 million bonus tied to the chronologie des médias — France's legally negotiated sequence of release windows. Under the current settlement, a film must wait roughly 15 months after its cinema premiere before a subscription streamer can show it. Arcom's offer is transactional: invest €90m and keep the long window, or invest €110m and earn a shorter one.
That is a revealing piece of policy design. An investment quota is, in principle, a cultural-funding tool. Using it as a lever to defend theatrical windowing turns it into something else — a price list for business-model flexibility. A streamer that believes its subscribers want films sooner cannot simply make that product decision; it must buy the right back from the regulator at €20 million a year. The open-internet objection is straightforward: distribution timing is a competitive variable, and pricing it through a regulator substitutes administrative judgement for the market's.
The obligation more than doubled in five years, with no upper bound: because the floor scales with French revenue, success in the market automatically raises the bill.
The second concern is the ratchet. The €40m-to-€90m jump in five years reflects both Prime Video's growth and Arcom's willingness to set ambitious figures. Because the obligation is indexed to French turnover, there is no natural ceiling — the better a platform performs, the larger its mandated spend, regardless of whether it has commercially viable French projects to fund in a given year. Mandated volume is not the same as good output; a quota guarantees euros deployed, not audiences served or works that travel beyond France.
A proportionate version exists
None of this argues for scrapping content obligations. A pro-innovation position can accept the core bargain — platforms that monetise a national audience should contribute to that country's creative economy — while insisting the instrument stay proportionate and predictable. Three adjustments would do most of the work.
- Decouple investment from windowing. Set the cultural-funding obligation on its own merits and let the chronologie des médias be negotiated separately. Bundling them lets a quota double as protection for incumbents.
- Cap the ratchet. Index obligations to turnover, but bound year-on-year increases so platforms can plan multi-year slates without a moving target.
- Reward portability, not just spend. Credit investment that produces French and European works with genuine international reach, aligning the regime with the EU's stated goal of globally competitive European content rather than purely domestic volume.
Why it matters beyond France
France is the template the rest of Europe studies. The AVMSD lets every member state impose investment obligations of up to 30% on streamers, and several — including Italy and Spain — have built their own versions on the French model. The United Kingdom is actively weighing similar levers for public-service content. Whatever Arcom normalises in Paris tends to propagate.
That is precisely why the windowing bonus deserves scrutiny now, while it is still a French peculiarity rather than a continental default. A €90 million content obligation on a platform earning hundreds of millions in France is defensible as the price of market access. Quietly converting that obligation into a toll on how and when companies are allowed to distribute their own films is a different proposition — and a worse one for the open, competitive internet that ultimately serves audiences best.