EU Filmmakers Support Call for Assessment of Global Streamers’ impact on European audiovisual creation

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Ahead of the May 18, 2020 Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council meeting, EU filmmakers very much welcome and support the proposal by the Spanish delegation to request that the European Commission investigate the impact of video-on-demand platforms on the EU audiovisual market, in particular on the relationships between the different actors in the value chain.

There is no denying the exponential rise of global streaming platforms in the European audiovisual sector online distribution and production market, accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. This does not only affect the way our sector operates on an industrial level, it has an impact on what stories for the screen are told today and will be told in the future across Europe.

While these on-demand services show that the European audiovisual industry has potential to reach international audiences as an audiovisual entertainment hub, it has also proven since its early age that the creative and artistic strength at the heart of its worldwide reputation comes from its diversity, from the originality of its unique creative voices and the diversity of local industrial ecosystems that reflects the variety of European cultural identities.

Today, global streamers are emerging as the rare players to have massively benefitted from the crisis, while local creation, production, distribution and cinema exhibition infrastructures are still severely hit.

The ongoing transpositions of the 2018 AVMS and 2019 Copyright Directives give us an opportunity to start evening the playing field – but we need to go much further if we want to foster a sustainable future for European audiovisual creation in the global streamers’ era and to ensure our sector’s cultural and industrial independence.

This has to start with a better objective understanding of these changes and of their cultural, creative, artistic and industrial consequences over time by European institutions, Member States and indeed by the industry itself.

That is why we urge policy-makers to take stock of our sector’s new cultural and industrial landscape in transposing landmark EU legislations and developing new policies with a clear goal to foster its artistic, creative and industrial strategic autonomy. Building on our sector’s cornerstones – authors’ rights, media regulation and public support – will allow for the long-term resilience and sustainability of our sector in Member States with various production capacity.

European cultural diversity is crucial to the development of local cultural identities, and audiovisual creation is one of its essential components – only if we can continue to create our own compelling stories for the screen and for all audiences.

 

Download PDF version of the statement here.

 

Photo by Marie Pierre Morel on the set of “Online Justice”, directed by Lou Jeunet.