According to one of the latest reports from the European Audiovisual Observatory, the 12 major audiovisual companies on the continent accumulate up to 62% of the European market’s income. Furthermore, all of these firms show up in the 2014 ranking of the top-50 biggest world audiovisual groups, with one of them - British telecommunications Company Sky - making its way into the top ten with a cumulated revenue of €13.119 million last year (still far from the numbers achieved by the US' Comcast Corporation, occupying first place on the list, with a total of €36.062 million). But even though top European companies do make a limited fraction of their profit from outside Europe, they account for an increasing share of the internal market’s turnover, leaving the rest (around 38%) to US-based companies and small European players. Five out of the top 12 companies are public service broadcasters, like ARD (Germany), the BBC (UK), France Télévisions (France), RAI (Italy) and ZDF (Germany).

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Over the past five years, the worldwide revenues of the leading audiovisual groups have increased faster than the market itself, due to a steady inclination towards consolidation in the USA. On the other hand, this process did not take place in Europe or Japan, where the major companies experienced a slower upgrowth and there were no examples of important concentration, with the remarkable exception of Sky UK, which completely took over Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland. However, the US, with 27 companies sharing 69% of the aggregate world revenues, still takes the lion's share.

These data have just been published in the newly launched Yearbook Online Service by the Strasbourg-based European Audiovisual Observatory. The Observatory has already been supplying information and comparative data on the European media market since 1992, but with this new platform, all of the intelligence is now available as a fully searchable digital service online. Data can be searched for by topic, country or thematic tag, and subsequently downloaded in PDF form or Excel files from the platform, which is divided into three different sections: Pan-European data sets, country profiles and key trends. A total of 40 different countries are covered by the Yearbook Online Service: all EU member countries plus Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montenegro, Morocco, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Turkey.