When Europeans open a streaming app tonight, they do not simply choose entertainment. They enter an attention system that decides what is surfaced, what is sidelined, and what becomes ‘normal’ through rankings, recommendations, and autoplay. As the EU prepares for the 2026 review of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD),
Tamás Joó
When Europeans open a streaming app tonight, they do not simply choose entertainment.
They enter an attention system that decides what is surfaced, what is sidelined, and what becomes ‘normal’ through rankings, recommendations, and autoplay.
As the EU prepares for the 2026 review of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), this is no longer just a cultural debate.
It is a question of market design, democratic resilience, and strategic capacity.
Europe’s weakness is not production. The continent still makes over 2,000 feature-length films each year, supported by a dense ecosystem of schools, festivals, funds, and co-productions.
The failure sits downstream: in discoverability, recommendation dynamics, and the data that steers cross-border demand. Visibility is power. Prominence is policy. Audience data is leverage.
“The cultural identity of our nations is at stake, and so is peoples’ right to their own culture,” said then French president Francois Mitterrand when he sought to justify state support for the French culture sector.
The distribution architecture has changed since the “cultural exception” debates. The strategic risk has not.
A gap we can measure
The mismatch is now empirical. European works account for roughly a third of EU video-on-demand (VoD) catalogues, yet their consumption share is markedly lower.
On major streaming services, Europe’s viewing market share is often around 18-20 percent within Europe.
Availability is not attention, and attention is not neutral. It is engineered by interface design, recommender systems, marketing scale, and data advantages.
In a world of infinite shelves, the scarce resource is not content but visibility.
Europe used to regulate distribution with clearer ambition. The underlying principle came first: Europe can set distribution conditions so cultural goals are not overwhelmed by concentration and market power.
In linear broadcasting, that logic was expressed through a simple lever — reserving a majority, i.e. more than 50 percent, of transmission time for European works — and it was consolidated early in the Television Without Frontiers Directive.
Platforms have replaced schedules with algorithms, but the policy challenge is the same: whoever controls the gateway controls the market.
Puttnam’s lesson
The platform era has also exposed a deficit of European confidence.
In 1986, British Oscar-winning producer David Puttnam was appointed to lead Columbia Pictures. His wager was unapologetically European: anchor a major studio in more humanistic, idea-driven cinema, while connecting European creators to a global production-and-distribution machine.
His tenure ended quickly under corporate restructuring and shareholder pressure.
Yet the instinct matters. It is about the capacity to shape global taste, not merely to subsidise local supply.
Contrast that with Europe’s posture in the streaming age.
In the last AVMSD revision, the flagship measure for on-demand services was no longer majority logic, but a minimum 30 percent European-works catalogue quota, coupled with an obligation to ensure prominence.
That was a necessary modernisation, but also a quiet retreat from a broadcast regime built around majority presence to a thinner guarantee focused on catalogue share, precisely when recommendation engines and marketing intensity determine what audiences actually see.
Europe keeps producing at volume, but too few works travel far at meaningful scale.
And Europe still speaks of ‘the market’ as if it were weather, rather than a designed environment shaped by rules, interfaces, and data control.
Three instruments for the ‘platform age‘
Europe does not need to dismantle Creative Europe, Eurimages, or national and regional support systems. It needs complementary tools built for the platform economy: scale, craft, evidence, integrity.
1. Automatic reinvestment that rewards verified success
The EU should pilot a rules-based, performance-triggered reinvestment mechanism for European-owned production companies.
When a European film or series reaches verified results — box office, VoD revenue, or cross-border reach — it should trigger capped automatic reinvestment.
This would strengthen companies that can repeatedly reach audiences and shift part of public support from discretionary selection toward proven capacity.
2. A European Academy of Storytelling for serial and cross-border craft
Europe’s bottleneck is not talent.
It is repeatable high-end development capacity that travels: writers’ rooms, showrunning, long-arc development, producer-writer collaboration, and market-facing packaging.
A pan-European hub could professionalise this craft through advanced labs, writers’ room simulations, producer-writer development tracks, and cross-border project acceleration for series and films designed to sustain attention across languages and markets.
That is capacity-building, not content control.
3. A Market and Algorithm Evidence Unit with enforceable data access
‘Prominence’ cannot remain aspirational. Europe needs a standing capability to measure how discoverable European works actually are in practice: comparable metrics, regular audits of prominence implementation, validated methodologies for regulators, and standardised data access.
Without evidence and enforceability, policy governs blindfolded while platforms optimise in the dark.
Critics will call this centralisation or protectionism.
That misreads the design. Reinvestment is rules-based. An academy trains professionals; it does not prescribe stories. Evidence capacity strengthens legitimacy by replacing guesswork with measurable outcomes.
Europe’s problem is not creativity, but that it has outsourced the narrative layer of its public sphere to systems optimised for others’ interests.
The 2026 AVMSD review is a chance to treat visibility, data access, and cross-border scale as strategic infrastructure, not decorative cultural policy.
Europe can still reverse course, but only if it stops mistaking catalogue presence for cultural power. In the platform era, sovereignty is built where attention is allocated.
