Keynote: Discoverability of What for Whom?:Inequalities in Europe’s Path towards a Competitive European Audiovisual Industry and a Diverse Cultural Public Sphere

Discoverability of European works on streaming services has been high on political agendas ever since the revision of the AVMSD in 2018. The quota for European works, investment obligations and the call for their prominence aims to unite two policy objectives: sustaining revenue for the European audiovisual industries in the platform age and ensuring audiences’ access to European works for the benefit of diversity of cultural expression or even European integration. With evidence from VoD catalogues, interfaces and research into European audiences, this talk maps the power dynamics that pitch these two objectives against each other and ultimately shape the outcome of these policies: Different levels of VoD market development across Europe, differences in scale between European and global platforms, competition between content from different European countries as well as representations aimed at national vs. transnational audiences, personalization obscuring transparency and a lack of attention to European content’s discoverability beyond streaming.