European Quotas Alone Won’t Get Films Across Borders. A New CIRG Study Explores a Path Towards a More Open Audiovisual Market

How effectively does European audiovisual policy support the availability of films and other audiovisual works across EU Member States? A new study by Pavel Zahrádka and Miroslav Krša highlights the limitations of current policy instruments and proposes an alternative way of making European works accessible to audiences in countries where they are not commercially distributed.

The study European Audiovisual Policy Between Quotas and Digital Borders: Rethinking Accessibility, published as the 14th issue of the Access Points series at the University of Münster, examines two key instruments of European audiovisual policy: quotas for European works in television broadcasting and VOD catalogues, and legislative measures aimed at creating a single European audiovisual market.

 

Drawing on a critical analysis of academic literature, legal and policy documents, and data from the European Audiovisual Observatory, the authors argue that neither of these instruments has so far substantially improved the cross-border availability of European audiovisual works. According to the study, quotas primarily support domestic production and national audiovisual markets, while the harmonisation of the legal framework alone does not remove barriers arising from territorial licensing and differences in audience demand across countries.

 

The authors therefore propose complementing existing European audiovisual policy with a mechanism that would enable works to be made legally available in countries for which no commercial licence has been granted once their main phase of commercial exploitation has ended. The study develops the idea of a publicly supported “fallback TVOD” service, designed to reduce the long-term digital unavailability of European works in certain EU Member States.

 

The publication was produced as part of the project Challenges of Access to Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age and appeared in the Access Points series of the research group Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change at the University of Münster and is freely available online under a CC BY 4.0 licence.