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EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

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Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#31

Post by scbrg »

drakonka wrote: post #10
comboy wrote: post #3

> So the move — which will probably draw loud and hair-raising screams from U.S. commentators — is, nonetheless, A Good Thing. I'm in EU. A Good Thing is letting me watch whatever the fuck I want. It's a real dystopia if the state decides which movies you should or shouldn't watch.

I don't think anybody's proposing a quota on individuals. You can watch whatever you want.

Well, they effectively put a cap on available foreign content to 2.3 times what's available domestically. If there's, say, 300 movies produced in your country, you will have to limit the selection of foreign movies to 700.

Numbers picked from thin air as an example, but I still say that it quite severely limits my choice as an individual.

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#32

Post by martin-adams »

What's to prevent streaming services just underfunding projects to tick the boxes of getting the catalogue to 30%?

Producers can secure rights to a movie that in order to retain the rights, the must produce a film - of any quality. That's how 1994 version of Fantastic Four was made. A low budget B-movie to prevent the rights being transferred back to Stan Lee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrbFLJHeX8w

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#33

Post by v_lisivka »

dantheman wrote: post #4

Protectionism is bad in all its forms. Content providers want to capture the local market and should include local productions -- if that's what the subscribers want. Mandating a quota is backwards. If a state wants to sponsor work and make it available at low costs I'm sure content services would jump to provide it. All this does is either increase cost or reduce available selection in the affected markets. If the s…

Protectionsm is bad in all its forms. USA wants to protect it markets, and English language is one of tools to do that. Same for Russian language. Google forces me to Russian and English sites even if local versions are exist and I explicitly say that I want local version via "lang:Ukrainian". Google just ignores me and my needs and drives traffic to Russian and English sites. Youtube tries to convince me with Russian clips for years. The only tool I have is to ban every Russian clip I saw, but it helps only partially. I cannot do that for English clips, so my Recommended page is 99% of English clips and few ones sometimes in Ukrainian.

I have my own site: Linux.org.ua. At beginning, it was very popular site because it was the top national site about Linux. Then Google turned switch (in 2007?) and redirected all our national traffic to linux.org.ru, because 150M Russians is way more than 50M Ukrainians. Same for other sites, so almost all our niche national sites died.

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#34

Post by r3bl »

julesie wrote: post #9

How can this work in practice? Can the 30% be from any EU country? I'm Irish, we don't produce that much stuff. If it has to represent 30% of the catalogue, that catalogue is going to have to shrink massively.

Yeah, I'm failing to see the practice behind this as well.

It was big news in Croatia that Netflix got a local TV show available in its catalogue a few months ago (The Paper, AKA Novine in Croatian). As far as I can tell, it remains the only one.

In practice, does that mean that Netflix would have to reduce their Croatian catalogue to like three shows until they purchase the rights to reproduce additional domestic ones?

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#35

Post by AllegedAlec »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #30
AllegedAlec wrote: post #17

I've said this before, but the EU overstepped their intended mandate the very moment they decided that they were more than the ECSC. It is beyond me how those numbnuts in Brussels keep thinking up more stupid and useless plans each time. Not only is it completely up to streaming services what they do and do not offer in terms of content, now you force those services to split up what they show per country, decentralis…

>It is beyond me how those numbnuts in Antwerp keep thinking up more stupid and useless plans each time You may question your sources of information.

Yeah, stupid mistake. I meant Brussels.

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#36

Post by gonvaled »

beaconstudios wrote: post #5
gonvaled wrote: post #2

Extremely good news: left unchecked, the "market" would let minority communities behind.

the market just matches providers with consumers. Netflix and other providers respond to demand - if they aren't showing the content you want, it's likely that (given any reasonable level of demand) someone else will be. Forcing providers to produce content with less demand is purely ideological because if the demand were high, they would already be producing content to match it. Which they do. What the EU is trying…

Not even close to the truth. What you are describing is a perfect functioning market, with producers just interested in serving the needs of the customers. In reality, things are way more complex:

- producers try to reduce costs

- producers ignore customer demands as long as they are able to do it. In particular when the customer has no option because competitors are following the same cost-saving approach.

- customers give up and start watching second-best options, and get used to them (tragedy of the commons)

- there are synergy effects which allow producers to get away with sub optimal options: I will use my Amazon Prime account to watch videos, even if I am not entirely happy with the offer, because I am already paying for Prime for delivery.

- the world is complicated, and consumers have little time and power, while producers can spend time writing 30 pages contracts. The only way to balance power here is to associate, but citizens are quite bad at it. The EU is an association, and I am happy that they are taking into account the consumer's interests.

I wonder when will this fallacy of "the market works to fulfill the interests of the customers" die out ...

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#37

Post by Bizarro »

FearNotDaniel wrote: post #26
comboy wrote: post #3

> So the move — which will probably draw loud and hair-raising screams from U.S. commentators — is, nonetheless, A Good Thing. I'm in EU. A Good Thing is letting me watch whatever the fuck I want. It's a real dystopia if the state decides which movies you should or shouldn't watch.

Given a choice of dystopias, I would also prefer to avoid the one where "the market" decides what I should or shouldn't watch. Nothing here is suggesting that you should be prevented from watching Jersey Shore, or the Kardashians, or whatever superhero action flick is in vogue this month, if that's your taste; but if it all came down to money then that's all any of us would get whether we like it or not.

Given a choice of dystopias, I would also prefer to avoid the one where "the market" decides what I should or shouldn't watch.

You really want the state deciding what you watch?

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#38

Post by tenfold »

davedx wrote: post #23
ethbro wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to watch a movie that never gets produced. Let's not pretend there aren't strong tendencies towards centralization and homogenization in media. (That we could, most charitably, ascribe to efficiency and risk management) On the other side, yes, protectionism leads to a lot of otherwise unmarketable things being produced (looking at you, France). But balance doesn't seem like too much to ask. Because Hollywoo…

> But balance doesn't seem like too much to ask. Because Hollywood is doing fuck all for diversity. Six million Wakandans might disagree with you...

Clear tokenism. How often is a film like that released? If anything its success is a reflection of the potential for more diverse protagonists.

Re: EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services

#40

Post by beobab »

ethbro wrote: post #29
davedx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But balance doesn't seem like too much to ask. Because Hollywood is doing fuck all for diversity. Six million Wakandans might disagree with you...

I'm as much of a Black Panther fan as anyone... but how many Hispanic Marvel superheroes are there?

Loads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latino_superheroes
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