Thirty Per Cent of a Streaming Catalogue in Europe Must Be European. The Catalogue Is Not Where the Argument Ends.

by Amara Diallo · August 28, 2026

Culture & Entertainment Writer, The Globe Ledger

Content quotas are one of the oldest instruments in cultural policy and one of the least discussed. The idea is simple: a distribution channel that reaches a national audience must carry a defined minimum of work from that country or region. It was invented for cinemas and refined for broadcast television, where it had an obvious purchase — a broadcaster has a schedule, a schedule has finite hours, and hours can be counted.

On-demand streaming broke that logic. There is no schedule. There is a catalogue that can hold tens of thousands of titles and a recommendation system that decides which few dozen a given household ever sees. The European Union's answer was to rewrite the quota for the new shape of the object, and the result is the clearest live example anywhere of a state trying to legislate the composition of a streaming service.

What the rule actually says

The instrument is the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. For traditional broadcasters it retains the older mechanism: a majority proportion of transmission time must be reserved for European works, with time given to news, sports events, games, advertising, teletext services and teleshopping excluded from the calculation. Article 17 adds a second layer, requiring broadcasters to reserve at least 10 per cent of their transmission time — or, at a member state's option, at least 10 per cent of their programme budget — for European works created by producers independent of broadcasters, with the same exclusions applying.

The 2018 revision extended the principle to on-demand services. The European Commission's Guidelines on European Works, published on 2 July 2020, set out the operative figure: on-demand providers must carry at least a 30 per cent share of European content in their catalogue. The guidelines exist because the number is harder to apply than to state, and they deal specifically with how the 30 per cent share is to be calculated and with the definitions of the low-audience and low-turnover exemptions that release small providers from the obligation.

The Directive also gives member states a second lever alongside the shelf-space rule. On-demand promotion of European works, the Commission explains, can be delivered through financial contributions to the production of European works and the acquisition of rights in them, or by ensuring a share and prominence of European works in the catalogue. In practice most member states use both, and the European Audiovisual Observatory published a mapping of these national financial obligations on video-on-demand services in an IRIS Plus report on 24 May 2022, tracking how differently the same Directive was transposed across the bloc.

One definitional point matters more than it looks. A "European work" is a legal category, not an aesthetic one: audiovisual productions originating in EU member states, productions from parties to the relevant European convention that meet specified conditions, and co-productions between EU and third countries that satisfy the conditions of the applicable agreements. A film qualifies through its financing and production geography. Nothing in the definition says anything about what it is like to watch.

The catalogue is already compliant. The viewing is not.

Now the interesting part, and it comes from the European Audiovisual Observatory — the Council of Europe body that measures this market rather than regulating it.

In figures published on 28 March 2024, the Observatory found that European works made up 31 per cent of all works in video-on-demand catalogues across 25 EU member states, measured in September 2023. Of that, EU27 works accounted for 21 per cent and other European works for 10 per cent. The obligation itself falls on each provider rather than on a market, and small services can be released from it by the low-audience and low-turnover exemptions, so a market-wide 31 per cent is not itself proof of compliance. But in aggregate the shelf is stocked at roughly the level the rule asks for.

The same release measured what people actually watched. Across a sample of nine EU countries — Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden — between September 2022 and September 2023, 30 per cent of subscription video-on-demand viewing time went to content from the European Union plus the United Kingdom: 21 per cent to EU works, 9 per cent to UK works and 1 per cent to other European works.

Do the arithmetic carefully, because the two measurements do not use the same boxes. EU27 works occupy 21 per cent of catalogue titles and receive 21 per cent of viewing time — parity. The catalogue's remaining European share, 10 per cent, is reported as a single "other European works" category, which is where UK titles sit; on the viewing side that same non-EU European group is split out as 9 per cent for the United Kingdom and 1 per cent for everywhere else in Europe, totalling 10 per cent. Non-EU European works therefore also land at rough parity in aggregate, with the United Kingdom accounting for almost all of it. The 1 per cent figure is not the conversion rate of a 10 per cent shelf share; reading it that way compares a category against a different category.

The comparison should be handled as indicative rather than exact. The catalogue measurement covers 25 member states at a single point in September 2023; the viewing measurement covers nine countries over a twelve-month window; and the two are grouped differently, the catalogue counting European works in two blocks and the viewing figures separating the United Kingdom out as a third. The Observatory's own summary of the pattern is direct — US works are systematically overconsumed and European works underconsumed relative to their share of catalogues — and works from other regions of the world took 8 per cent of viewing time, also well under their catalogue share. The direction of the finding is robust. The decimal points are not.

What a quota can and cannot buy

The structural lesson is worth separating from the politics. A catalogue quota is a rule about supply. It guarantees that a European title is present and findable. It says nothing about whether it is surfaced, promoted, dubbed, thumbnailed, positioned on the first row, or recommended to a household on a Tuesday evening. That is what the Directive's prominence language is reaching for, and prominence is a far harder thing to define, let alone audit, than a percentage of titles.

Nor does the presence of a title tell you what was spent on it. A catalogue can be brought into compliance by licensing a large volume of older, cheap European material as easily as by commissioning new work — which is precisely why the financial-contribution route exists alongside the shelf-space route, and why member states that care about production capacity tend to lean on the money lever rather than the percentage.

Underneath the whole architecture is an older claim about what cultural goods are. UNESCO's 2005 Convention, adopted by the organisation's General Conference, is the treaty expression of it: the Convention aims, in UNESCO's description, to "protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions, particularly as embodied and conveyed in cultural activities, goods and services", and to establish "a legal framework favourable to all with regard to the production, distribution/dissemination, access to and enjoyment of a wide range of cultural expressions of diverse origin". The premise is that a film is not only a traded product, and that states may therefore treat it differently from other traded products.

The trade evidence UNESCO itself publishes explains why the argument has stayed alive. In the organisation's Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity reporting, exports of cultural goods and services roughly doubled in value between 2005/2006 and 2019, but developed countries account for an average of 95 per cent of total exports in cultural services, the participation of developing countries in global flows of cultural goods has stagnated, and the least developed countries represent less than 0.5 per cent of global cultural goods trade while being, in UNESCO's phrase, invisible in international trade in cultural services. Foreign direct investment runs the same way, and the preferential treatment provisions intended to correct it remain, UNESCO says, underused.

And there is a measurement caveat that sits under everything above. UNESCO notes that as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digitisation in the production, distribution and access of cultural goods and services, measuring the exchanges in services becomes all the more important — which is a polite way of recording that the statistical apparatus was built for physical goods crossing borders, and that a great deal of the modern cultural economy consists of a file being streamed from a server in another jurisdiction. The numbers describing the global culture trade are weakest exactly where the industry has moved.

So the honest summary of Europe's experiment is narrower than either its advocates or its critics tend to make it. The quota works as a quota: catalogues carry the required European share, and European works convert that shelf space into roughly proportionate viewing time. What the Observatory's figures also show is that US works draw more attention than their catalogue presence and works from the rest of the world draw less — an imbalance in attention that a rule about shelf space was never built to reach. Regulation can decide what is available. What gets watched is settled somewhere else entirely.