A directive six years in the making
On 29 April 2026, Coimisiún na Meán — Ireland's media regulator — opened a public consultation on draft European Rules for on-demand audiovisual services. After an extension, it closed on 17 June 2026. The rules would require every video-on-demand provider under Irish jurisdiction to hold a minimum of 30% European Works in its catalogue, calculated by a "title-based methodology," alongside standards for how prominently those works must be displayed (Coimisiún na Meán).
The obligation itself is not new. Article 13 of the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive (Directive (EU) 2018/1808) required member states to secure this exact 30% share and prominence for European works in VOD catalogues, with a transposition deadline of 19 September 2020 (European Commission). Ireland missed that deadline by two years — the implementing law, the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act 2022, was not transposed until late 2022 (Mason Hayes & Curran). Now, nearly six years after the original EU deadline, Ireland is only just finalizing the operational mechanics — how to count a title, how to measure prominence — of an obligation it agreed to in 2018. That lag matters: it is the clearest evidence that this is a low-urgency compliance exercise, not a crisis requiring aggressive new enforcement.
The case for the quota, stated fairly
The strongest argument for a hard content quota is straightforward: recommendation algorithms optimize for engagement, and engagement on a Netflix or Disney+ homepage skews toward high-budget Anglophone franchises, not Irish-language drama or smaller European co-productions. Left purely to market logic, a European work with a modest marketing budget can be functionally invisible in a catalogue of thousands of titles, no matter how good it is. A prominence standard — not just a quota, but a requirement that these titles actually surface in menus and search — is a real attempt to fix a discovery problem, not just a production one. Ireland's own Oireachtas Joint Committee on Media made a related argument in September 2025, when it published 85 recommendations urging the government to proceed with a content levy on streamers, arguing platforms extract substantial value from the Irish market and should reinvest in it (The Irish Times).
Where the quota model breaks down
But a title-based quota is a blunt instrument for a discovery problem. Counting each title equally, regardless of budget, audience size, or whether anyone actually watches it, creates an obvious compliance path: platforms can pad catalogues with low-cost European library titles to hit 30% without meaningfully changing what an Irish subscriber actually encounters or watches. That satisfies the letter of Article 13 while doing little for the cultural-diversity goal the rule claims to serve. A prominence standard, meanwhile, is a mandate to shape a private company's recommendation surface — a much more invasive intervention than a numeric floor, and one Coimisiún na Meán's own consultation document acknowledges needs careful methodology precisely because "prominence" is inherently harder to define and measure than a catalogue percentage.
The consultation document does build in proportionality: providers can seek exemption based on low turnover, limited audience reach, or narrow subject matter (Coimisiún na Meán), which should keep the rule from crushing niche or entrant services. That is the right instinct. It also means the quota's practical bite falls almost entirely on the handful of large global platforms it was designed for — Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video — which is at least honest about who is meant to bear the compliance cost.
The quota is the easy half of the argument
What's notable is what Ireland is not resolving alongside this quota: money. Article 13(2) of the AVMSD separately lets member states require platforms to financially contribute to European production — the so-called "Netflix levy" — and Ireland has spent over a year fighting about exactly that, without the quota fight attached. In April 2025, the government amended legislation to make any such levy contingent on ministerial sign-off; media minister Patrick O'Donovan said he had "no intention" of allowing one until satisfied it wouldn't impose an "undue burden," warning that costs would ultimately be passed to consumers already squeezed by the cost of living (Screen Daily). The Oireachtas committee's September 2025 push to revive it went nowhere against that ministerial veto.
That split is revealing. A content quota costs platforms compliance effort but no direct cash, and it survived; a financial levy costs platforms and possibly consumers real money, and it stalled. Ireland's government is comfortable regulating catalogue composition but not comfortable taxing streaming revenue — a distinction that looks less like principled proportionality and more like picking the fight that's politically cheaper to win. Regulators finalizing these rules should be honest that a catalogue quota, however carefully calibrated, is the easier half of the AVMSD's cultural-policy toolkit — and shouldn't be mistaken for having resolved the harder question of how European production actually gets funded.