Streaming giants target European market for growth and expansion
Streaming giants target European market for growth and expansion
In their Parisian apartment, big streaming series fan Samuel Musachio, his wife and child settle down to watch the last episode of “Weekend Family.”
The show is about a French stepfamily and is completely French-made. It’s also made by Disney.
Musachio’s watched plenty of other “regional originals” as the streamers call them. Netflix’s “Represent,” for example, is about France electing a black president.
This content is quite different, he says, from what France’s domestic TV networks make.
“It’s very multicultural, a lot younger and a lot riskier,” Musachio said. “I don’t know if they’d be produced by the main channels.”
With growth in the streaming market leveling off in the U.S., content providers like Disney, Amazon and Netflix are investing heavily in new markets in Europe.
Amazon, meanwhile, has shifted some major productions to Europe. Disney has upped the number of its European productions.
Netflix recently doubled the capacity of its Spanish studios and launched 25 new series and films last year in France.
Grégoire Bideau, a researcher at the Sorbonne University in France, said this is a big achievement as this country is traditionally so protective of its movie industry.
“Netflix’s strategy in France was to seduce the French local industry by producing local content and by showing they will put in an effort to integrate themselves to the local industry,” he said.
According to film critic Frédéric Mercier, this investment in Europe is producing a generation of film industry technicians the likes of which France has never seen before.
“We see new training courses — new schools even — that are turning out young film industry professionals capable of producing content as if they were working on an assembly line — like the majors do in Hollywood,” Mercier said.
With these young movie professionals now working on films in France, the streamers’ hope is that more and more of these productions will be palatable to the French, even if they come from big American companies.
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