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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

#261

Post by swebs »

hjnilsson wrote: post #146
phobosdeimos wrote: post #109

Everyone here actively despises the local film industry. We do not need to inflict Dutch television on the world. Thats torture. Good shows should earn their ratings, not be force fed- if your culture is so great France and Germany you wouldn't need these subsidies. Netflix is not a public broadcaster.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it will pretty much never be cost-efficient to make a German language movie with a limited market compared to a English movie. No matter how great it is. It is even worse for smaller countries like Finland or Netherlands. There will NEVER be comparable ratings for a Dutch comedy show vs Modern Family with a global audience. So unless regulated, investments will shift to…

There's plenty of Finnish TV shows that are popular within Finland. Children and the elderly do not have English literacy rates as high as the rest of the population. Most kids shows are either produced locally or dubbed in Finnish.

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

#262

Post by phyller »

noobermin wrote: post #233
phyller wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is incredibly culturally diverse, it's a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It's just not delineated by state. There are geographic pockets of one culture or another, but frequently a single geographical area has many different cultures in it, so it isn't as easy to draw a line around your culture and make laws to protect it. A culture lives and dies on its own efforts and merits.

It is not as diverse for major film. Most of the film in the US comes from Hollywood.

So? Walk onto a set and I bet you'll find people from every continent except Antarctica there. People born on those continents too, not just descendants.

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

#263

Post by iknowstuff »

sannee wrote: post #118

This is the side of the EU that foreigners usually don't see. This is the reason there are movements for quitting in every member state (with varying levels of success). The isolationism EU is beginning to display is starting to worry even me and the alternative is a bunch of UKIP-like nationalist which I am not really a big fan of.

The alternative is voting for people who support your viewpoint in the upcoming European Parliament elections next year, not quitting.

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

#264

Post by swebs »

xugo wrote: post #90

I'd rather EU forces stream providers to have one account valid for the whole of Europe. I'm French, lived 10 years in England and now in Spain, I want one iTunes account to give me access to the full EU library and not needing 3 seperate accounts. Same thing with Netflix and Digital TV. That would also help Europeans understand their neighbours better. These region-restricted distribution contracts should not exist…

I haven't used Netflix in a few years so I don't know if it works the same now, but the region restrictions were based on your IP address, not credit card info or anything. That meant you could easily turn on a VPN and easily access the worldwide Netflix library.

They would blacklist IPs from public VPNs like Private Internet Access, but you could easily just set up OpenVPN on a Linode to get around that.

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

#265

Post by phyller »

Fnoord wrote: post #92
phyller wrote: post #7

> The proposals will require that streaming services give over at least 30% of their on-demand catalogues to original productions made in each EU country where a service is provided (individual EU Member States could choose to set the content bar even higher, at 40%) 30% for each country seems really high to me. As usual for regulation, there will likely be high unintended consequences. While in the US and elsewhere…

Its not as if Netflix is the creme de la creme of cinema. Netflix already sucks outside the US. Outside the US, there's far less content, and there is either way a lot of filler content anyway. What is going to happen is that Netflix will get the rights to stream (hopefully quality) local movies and series. That's gonna differ per country in EU. For example, some movies get broadcasted once or twice on public TV and…

Something to think about, if Netflix comes in with their brand recognition and cash and buys the digital rights (more money for exclusive rights of course) to the local movies, this regulation basically locks up the market for them. As long as they have the bigger user base, they can pay more for any new local content, and effectively shut down any competitors. Amazon Prime might not be able to compete, forget about Hulu or whatever. So instead of a few big American companies and some local start ups in the market, you get just one big American company.

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

#266

Post by iknowstuff »

xugo wrote: post #90

I'd rather EU forces stream providers to have one account valid for the whole of Europe. I'm French, lived 10 years in England and now in Spain, I want one iTunes account to give me access to the full EU library and not needing 3 seperate accounts. Same thing with Netflix and Digital TV. That would also help Europeans understand their neighbours better. These region-restricted distribution contracts should not exist…

That was the plan as a part of the Digital Single Market (https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/digital-single-ma...) but they settled on, essentially, roaming for digital services for now: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-4681_en.htm

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

#267

Post by __d »

sannee wrote: post #250
noobermin wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sovereignty? By allowing the US to be the major cultural influence? Really?

You are missing the point. Each member nation should decide by itself about how open to outside cultural influences it is.

The advantage that the EU has in this situation is that it's better able to "negotiate" as a bloc of 450M people, than (to use the upstream example) eg. Malta, with 440,000 people.

If individual countries want to require a local content quota, Netflix/Amazon/etc will simply cut them off. When it's a massive market, that's vastly less likely.

Giving individual countries an opt-out from the EU-wide rules just provides an opportunity to divide and conquer.

Australia has similar content quotas for broadcast television, but hasn't tried to apply them to streaming services yet. Of course, for 25M people, our leverage is substantially less.

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

#268

Post by hardlianotion »

pas wrote: post #167
kodablah wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't have your cake and eat it too: either you want sovereignty, or you want to be part of a bigger system in which you cannot always get your way. I'm not sure that's true. I think the EU, as a non-political economic union gives you that cake. It's the political side keeping you from eating it. I think there are many financial policies that can be properly disentangled from political beliefs and the ones that…

There's no economics without politics, and vice versa. The EU as a single market has great potential. But that needs uniform and standardized access, which is politics. And no, it wouldn't work without the political overlay (or foundations), because member states are already each in a non pure market state, and it would take a very long time for those politically disjoint markets to standarize and uniformize. And the…

As irrelevant as Australia, Japan, Canada, South Korea?

I think I could handle that.

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

#269

Post by gamblor956 »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #231
munk-a wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also * cough * a good chunk of those US shows/movies are made up here in Vancouver anyways.

Or Toronto, aka "NYC on your favorite TV show"

LA is the more frequent stand-in for NYC on TV (e.g., CSI NY, Brooklyn 99, etc.). Humorously enough, Toronto frequently fills in for LA on lower-budget TV productions (e.g., Supergirl, anything on SyFy).

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

#270

Post by hardlianotion »

antidesitter wrote: post #152
rapsey wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Protectionism is bad in all its forms. Yet it was the basis for economic growth of every developed economy. From the US, Germany, Japan to China. The only countries that have no protectionism and free markets are poor African ones that find themselves under the IMFs thumb. All of which have stagnating economies.

Can you back up your claims with any evidence?

Here is a starting point for your research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang

He has written a lot on this subject.

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

Jane Jacobs is another who writes very clearly on the role protecting home markets ply in development.

Anecdotally, Victorian Britain was full of indignant stories about Yankees stealing intellectual property. One of the reasons Dickens conducted his US tours was to try and plead the case for payment with folk who were pirating his work.

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