Switzerland's Federal Office of Culture (BAK) announced in Locarno on August 6, 2026 that the 22 streaming platforms and broadcasters subject to the country's mandatory film-investment law — nicknamed "Lex Netflix" — invested CHF19.9 million into Swiss production in 2025, against a statutory obligation of CHF32.7 million. That leaves a CHF12.8 million gap, which companies have until the end of 2027 to close before an automatic substitute levy kicks in.
The headline the BAK chose to lead with was the 25% year-on-year increase, up from CHF15.9 million invested in 2024, the law's first year. The shortfall is the more interesting number: it says less about streamer non-compliance than about the mismatch between how the obligation was calibrated and how platform revenue and production cycles actually behave.
The Steelman
Switzerland's case for the mandate is genuine, not manufactured. The Film Act revision, approved by 58% of voters in a May 15, 2022 referendum, responded to a real structural problem: a small, multilingual market (German, French, Italian, Romansh) that global streamers can serve profitably without commissioning a single local production, while domestic broadcasters and cinemas have long funded Swiss film through licence fees and box-office levies. Article 24b of the Film Act requires any company offering films via broadcast, on-demand, or subscription service in Switzerland to invest at least 4% of its Swiss gross revenue into independent Swiss film production, or pay a substitute levy instead. Article 24a adds a 30% quota for European works in on-demand catalogues. Switzerland is not an outlier here — the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive already lets member states impose investment obligations on streamers reaching their territory, and France, Italy, and Spain all run comparable schemes. If a Swiss-language film industry is worth preserving as a matter of cultural policy, and global platforms are financially capable of contributing without materially denting their economics, an investment quota is a defensible, moderate instrument — considerably less restrictive than a content-blocking rule or a flat tax.
Where the Money Actually Went
Of the CHF19.9 million invested in 2025, CHF12 million went directly into producing or acquiring Swiss works — CHF7.4 million into series, CHF4.6 million into feature films — with the remaining CHF7.9 million spent on measures the ordinance also credits toward the obligation, such as project development. Financed productions cited by BAK and reported alongside the figures include Netflix's Winter Palace and Sky's Tschugger. On November 26, 2025, the Federal Council had already loosened the implementing ordinance (FQIV) to let companies count project-development spending, not just production, toward their obligation — a sign regulators recognized the original scope was tighter than the industry could realistically absorb in a single funding cycle.
The Case Against the Mandate as Designed
The shortfall is the tell. A regulation that two-thirds of obligated firms cannot fully satisfy in its second consecutive year is not obviously miscalibrated at the margin — it's structurally out of step with how production financing works. Film and series slates are committed years in advance; a revenue-linked annual quota assumes streamers can conjure commissionable Swiss projects on a calendar the law sets, not on the calendar the market offers. That mismatch is precisely why the four-year deferral window exists, and its presence is a tacit admission that the underlying design leans on flexibility to function at all.
There's also a pass-through risk regulators rarely account for: a mandatory investment obligation functions economically like a tax on Swiss-market revenue, and taxes on subscription services tend to show up, eventually, in subscription prices or reduced non-mandated investment elsewhere in the catalogue. Switzerland's 22 obligated companies generated CHF817 million in Swiss revenue in 2025, up 9% on the prior year — the underlying market is healthy, which argues that the CHF12.8 million gap is a financing-cycle problem, not evidence platforms are shirking. A better-calibrated version of this policy would average the obligation over the same multi-year window used for the substitute levy, rather than measuring compliance annually and only smoothing enforcement after the fact.
A More Proportionate Path
None of this is an argument to scrap the obligation — the 25% year-on-year growth in actual investment suggests the law is doing real work building what BAK director Carine Bachmann called a fourth pillar of Swiss audiovisual financing, alongside federal funding, the SRG licence fee, and regional funds. But the November 2025 ordinance change and the built-in deferral both point the same direction: this is a policy still being tuned in response to real-world friction, not a fixed mandate streamers are dodging. Switzerland would do better to formalize the multi-year averaging it's already improvising, rather than publishing an annual shortfall figure that reads as non-compliance when it is, more precisely, a timing mismatch the law itself anticipated.