Content quotas: what and whom are the protecting?

When private television started to take off in Europe in the 1980s it confronted an environment in which the role of television and radio in cultural and national identity formation had already been established through national public service broadcasters (Gripsrud, 2007; Price, 1995). Having relied largely on publicly funded television and the film industry to produce such content, European countries lagged far behind the United States in terms of their capacity to generate content for television (Esser, 2009; Tunstall and Machin, 1999). The large private television networks and production houses in the United States were well situated to sell their content, particularly fiction and entertainment, to the new private channels in Europe. Most European countries placed requirements on their private television stations, and usually also radio, for certain amounts of domestically produced content. Their individual markets and production industries remained small compared with that of the United States, which fuelled part of the reasoning behind the EU’s Television without Frontiers Directive (TWF Directive) and the Council of Europe’s Convention on Transfrontier Television that followed. The TWF Directive, since amended and renamed the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS Directive), aimed to break down national barriers to broadcasting and to encourage a common, larger market for television. At the same time it included quotas for European works and independent production to be achieved by stations gradually and “where practicable” (Art. 16). This non-binding formulation was based on what many countries already had in a more obligatory form at the national level.