This is also not 100% voluntary by Netflix though for some of the bigger languages like French and German it totally makes economic sense too (as mentioned in the article). A few years ago EU mandated that a certain % of content on streaming services serving EU has to be produced within the EU. There is only so much English language content you can pump out in Europe so making (or just buying existing stuff like in the case of Finnish content for example) it in the other languages.
This always made sense to me, for example a profit driven TV station would have never put any money into creating say a children show based on national culture(Romanian children stories) when they could just get almost free stuff from Disney(because Disney also sells toys and other products they gain a lot if a new product is published in new markets).
When my child was very young I found only a small number of cartoons with Romanian content and most of that is stuff before 1989.
Off topic, for Romanian audio only stories I found this youtube playlist that grabbed the old vinyl tales we grew up with, I suggest you have a look and maybe backup them too, who know how much time they will be up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2rQVK1ig8g&list=PLFO3TQ182_...
And also, where both private and public broadcasters in most European countries certainly would like to sell their series abroad, they need to find a buyer. Netflix "just" needs to ensure their contracts allows them to target all their markets and provide translations, and see if it sticks. The threshold for Netflix to make e.g. a Norwegian series available across Europe and subtitle or dub it in a handful of languages is far lower than for a Norwegian production company to find buyers willing to both translate it and pay a fee to license it in each of the same countries.
So when Netflix are forced to produce some series in these countries anyway, they have a very strong incentive to recycle their investment in as many countries as possible if it's even somewhat plausible that it'll do ok.
This seems like a fairly impossible quotum to meet for streaming services that for instance serve nothing but Japanese content. — are they simply not allowed to operate within the E.U.?
> 1. Member States shall ensure that on-demand audiovisual media services provided by media service providers under their jurisdiction promote, where practicable and by appropriate means, the production of and access to European works. Such promotion could relate, inter alia, to the financial contribution made by such services to the production and rights acquisition of European works or to the share and/or prominence of European works in the catalogue of programmes offered by the on-demand audiovisual media service.
I would assume that falls under inpracticable. Stuff like crunchyroll is exists in the EU aswell.
If it's impractical in this case because a streaming service offers continent from outside of Europe; then the law is fairly useless. It's essentially a circular escape route of saying that it's impractical for a service to offer content produced in Europe, because the service does not offer content produced in Europe.
N.b. that the law speaks of Europe, not the E.U.; that's a particularly material difference with respect to the U.K. leaving the E.U..
I assume that they would have to be prepared to explain their case to the satisfaction of a human regulator. Crunchyroll being an anime streaming service is easy to understand. On the other hand, to my knowledge Netflix has never advertised itself as a platform for exclusively American content.
So all one needs to do is advertise oneself as such to be exempted?
I doubt that, and I, frankness be, suspect there's probably going to be some very dubious standard that will no doubt even consider race and other similar tribal nonsense when deciding to allow it or not.
If one deliver U.S.A. content one must deliver European content as well, for they are white, and thus they are like us, but the Japanese are not white, they are not like us, so we don't compare themselves with them, so one can offer their content without our egos feeling hurt.
Crunchyroll sponsors the production of lots of anime these days, and isn't too picky what they make (eg they've done like two fantasy novels written by misogynists about guys who travel to another world and get a sex slave.) They could sponsor adaptations of European stories, like Ghibli's already done.
I simply know many streaming services which obviously don't comply with such protectionism, yet are allowed to exist.
Does Youtube count as a streaming service? What of last.fm which does need to often comply with radio laws I believe.
The way I see it; if such laws were really consistently enforced then many things that exist would not be allowed to exist, and it seems to be more a matter of deciding not to enforce them based on the rather arbitrary criterion of “Do we want this service to stop existing or not?”.
And who is to decide what “Canadian culture” is, and when it is “promoted”? — the way I see it, such laws must be incredibly inconsistently enforced.
How last.fm works in it's streaming facility is that it creates a personalized radio station, if one will, based on past listening habits; it actually cannot allow users to select tracks, as that would not conform to radio laws.
It is thus entirely possible that no European music plays, based on past listening habits.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/26/eu-third-...