25/03/2025 - The organisation unveils troubling trends, such as a decrease in the production of European content and a slowing down of investment growth

The European Audiovisual Observatory’s annual report, entitled Key Trends 2025 and pertaining to the pan-European panorama of TV, film, video and on-demand audiovisual services (downloadable here), provided some highly informative insights on the occasion of a debate organised within the Series Mania Festival’s professional sidebar, the Series Mania Forum.

It transpires that the global context in which the audiovisual world is currently operating is particularly fierce, with an intense battle underway for advertising resources, an SVOD market which has reached maturity (whose new models are funded by advertising) but which is almost the only market not stagnating, struggling traditional TV broadcasters (despite slowly fleshing out their on-demand services), a segment of pay channels which are managing to keep themselves afloat (often by distributing SVOD services at reduced prices) but which are at risk of a similar downturn to that experienced in the USA (20 million fewer subscribers since 2014), and additional competition posed by video sharing platforms (which accounted for 24% of the advertising market in 2023 and which are taking off in terms of production budgets).

But what about series in this complex panorama? Do they really represent a lifeline? After a brief, post-pandemic return to growth, there was a decline in the production and broadcast of original TV dramas in Europe, with a 6% drop in the number of fiction titles produced in 2023, a similar reduction in terms of episode numbers, and stagnation in the number of hours. On average, more than 1,200 titles, 23,000 episodes and 14,000 hours of TV dramas are produced in Europe every year. But in order, no doubt, to combat production costs and inflation, series now have fewer episodes, shorter episodes and many of them are mini-series only intended to last one season. More globally however, daily soap operas and telenovelas are still dominant, with Germany, Poland and Greece leading production in this field. Overall, more than half of the fiction titles produced in Europe in 2023 were ordered by public broadcasters (55%), followed by private broadcasters (31%) and then streamers (14%).

Growth in investment in original European content has decelerated, recording just 8% growth in 2023, as opposed to double-digit growth in 2021 and 2022. Drilling down a little further, traditional broadcasters’ expenditure remained stable in 2023, whereas spending by streamers (who account for 26% of total spending) rose by 34% (contrasting, however, with the previous year which saw them doubling their investments). This remains a strong, rising trend, which might seem surprising since word would have it that streamers are trying to better control their spending on programming. But it does make sense, because some streamers only started investing in original European content recently (Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Max) and because they all have investment obligations thanks to the AVMS Directive (whose protection is therefore essential). There’s also the fact that Europe offers growth potential for streamers, because some European works enjoy global success and European productions are less costly to make. In all, Europe now accounts for 20% of streamers’ overall content spending, as opposed to 13% in 2021.

In 2023, the UK (29%) and Germany (20%) secured almost 50% of investments by broadcasters and streamers in original European content, ahead of France (14%), Spain (9%) and Italy (7%). But a different picture emerges if we focus solely on spending by streamers, which mostly went to the UK (35 %) and Spain (18 %), far ahead of France, Germany and Italy (11 % for each of them).

Equally deserving of a mention, among the pages of attention-worthy data included in the report, is the fact that 31,000 creators wrote and/or directed at least one cinema film or one TV/SVOD drama between 2015 and 2022, but that only 11 % of them are simultaneously active in both domains. This specialisation confirms the migration of creators towards series, but with one sizeable drawback: this production boom has gone hand in hand with heightened precariousness and competition, because the rise in the number of talented creative individuals in the series world is more significant than the demand, whereas the situation is more stable in the cinema sphere.

(Translated from French)