EU to move ahead with cultural quotas for streaming services
> 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%)<p>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 there will be thousands of movies available, if Netflix can only get the rights to 90 Belgian films, they aren't going to pay through the nose to create or purchase many more movies. They will just trim down the available movies in Belgium to 300. After all, no competition will be able to do any better.<p>Worst case scenario, someone may corner the market on digital rights to some country's movies, then they will be the only ones that can provide any sort of streaming service. That country will only have access to an expensive service with a limited selection.<p>In those cases, the locals will just continue to pirate movies as the only way to reasonable access them online, and the local film industry will be no better off than before as their consumers will be accustomed to getting their movies for free.<p>Imagine if every state in the US did this, what Netflix would look like. 30% of movies in Indiana need to be created in Indiana. Netflix would suck, ha.