Producers ask governments to make streamers pay for local stories

The argument about streaming and national culture is usually conducted in the language of taste. It is really an argument about commissioning, which is a budget decision made by a small number of people in a small number of places.

A coalition of international media organisations used the Toronto Film Festival to urge governments to support local producers against the ubiquity of global streaming services. The Hollywood Reporter reported that the consortium of 23 industry groups warned the reach of those services "puts local stories at risk" as Netflix, Amazon and YouTube reshape the global television market.

The remedy being sought is regulatory rather than commercial: rules compelling foreign platforms to subsidise local production in the markets where they sell subscriptions.

That instrument is not new. Broadcast licensing has carried local content obligations for decades, on the reasoning that a company using a national distribution privilege should contribute to the national production base. The platforms are being asked to inherit an obligation the broadcasters carried.

The counter-argument is that streamers already commission heavily outside their home markets, and that some of the past decade's most exported television has come from those commissions. That is true and does not settle the question.

What a local content rule protects is not the existence of production but control of it. A series commissioned by a global platform is typically made with the rights held centrally, which means the producer is paid a fee rather than owning an asset that keeps earning.

That distinction determines whether a production sector accumulates anything. A country can have busy studios, full crews and no domestically owned catalogue, and the second fact matters more over twenty years than the first does in any given one.

The inclusion of YouTube in the coalition's framing is the sharpest part of the complaint, because YouTube does not commission in the traditional sense at all. It competes for the same viewing hours while paying a revenue share to creators rather than financing production.

From a producer's chair that is the harder competitor. A subscription service can be made to contribute through a levy tied to its revenue in a territory. A platform built on user uploads has no commissioning budget to regulate.

The politics are more favourable than they were. Several governments have already moved on streaming levies, and a coalition of 23 groups exists to make the case a coordinated one rather than a series of national arguments conducted separately.

The unresolved question is what any levy actually buys. A payment into a production fund raises output; it does not, by itself, decide who ends up owning what is produced, and ownership is the thing the coalition is describing when it talks about local stories being at risk.