On 5 May, the European Parliament’s Culture Committee brought together four voices and four different perspectives to examine the EU audiovisual framework and its practical impact on the evolving media landscape. They shared a common conviction: Europe stands at a defining crossroads and the choices made now in reforming the audiovisual regulatory framework will shape not only the media market, but also the continent’s cultural identity, democratic resilience and creative sovereignty.

Luxembourgish media law professor Mark Cole underlined that the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) cannot be assessed in isolation. It must be understood as part of a wider ecosystem alongside the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) in order to avoid fragmentation. He stressed the need for coherence across these instruments; “it is less about adding new rules than about making the existing ones work”. These instruments sometimes overlap and sometimes leave gaps, and the priority must be to consolidate them into a coherent and readable regulatory framework that is clear for providers and citizens alike. Enforcement across national authorities, European bodies and the Commission is key. He also called for a distinction to be made between media platforms and generic platforms and for the protection of minors to be extended across the existing legislative framework.

Adeline Hulin, Head of Media and Information Literacy at UNESCO, highlighted a different kind of urgency. TikTok is now a primary news source for many Europeans and 78% of Europeans follow at least one content creator. These creators have, in their own way, rebuilt the bridge between audiences and current affairs, not as influencers chasing profit, but as a new category of information actors whose role is both fundamental and growing. Europe could soon count more than 25 million active creators. Yet the gap between their reach and their preparedness is alarming. Around 60% do not verify the information they publish and approximately 80% are unfamiliar with the legal framework that applies to them. Most are nano- or micro-entrepreneurs with precarious economic models, controlling neither the platform rules nor the algorithms on which they depend. When UNESCO launched its first content-creation education programme in 2025, more than 10,000 people enrolled within weeks, demonstrating the scale and urgency of the demand for training. Regarding the AVMSD revision, Hulin identified four structural tensions: the directive’s editorial responsibility framework is ill-suited to creators producing personal and hybrid content; the country-of-origin principle creates distortions, with increasing numbers of European creators relocating outside the EU while continuing to target European audiences; core AVMSD ambitions such as pluralism and the protection of minors are structurally difficult to transpose to the creator economy; and disinformation depends primarily on platform governance — meaning that the DSA is the appropriate instrument and the AVMSD should work in articulation with it rather than duplicate it.

Her conclusion pointed in the same direction as Cole’s: governance is just as fundamental as regulation, and regulating without educating people, she warned, risks entrenching problems rather than reducing them.

Producer Marta Krzeptowska brought the perspective of someone who has worked within the system for many years. Her observation was pointed: creative freedom is not primarily threatened by censorship but by the system itself. Storytelling is increasingly shaped by algorithmic and commercial calculation, optimised for attention and consumption. The result is more content and less understanding. European diversity, she argued, must not be decorative but structural. Audiovisual content shapes memory and a sense of belonging and, in turbulent times, this is one of Europe’s most important assets. Her priorities included making European works not merely present but genuinely prominent and discoverable within catalogues, ensuring transparent audience data, establishing a clear definition of “European work”, strengthening contribution obligations for those who benefit most from European audiences and extending the protection of minors beyond technical tools by investing in critical thinking.

Eventually, Swedish-born filmmaker Tarik Saleh (The Nile Hilton Incident, Boy from Heaven, Eagles from the Republic) spoke last and most personally. Hollywood, he argued, was built by European directors such as Miloš Forman, Elia Kazan and Mike Nichols, but the dynamic has since reversed, and Europe has developed the concept of the auteur: a form of creative freedom that no longer exists within the US studio system. He considers being a European director a mark of quality. Cinema, for Saleh, is the most democratic form of art: a cinema ticket to travel somewhere else, to become, for two hours, someone else. But it is also a collective and empathic experience and that is why keeping the theatrical experience alive is paramount: a hundred people in a darkened room, sharing the same emotional journey simultaneously.

To stress the importance of freedom of expression, he recounted his own experience while shooting The Nile Hilton Incident. Co-financed by four European countries, the film was shot in Morocco after Egyptian state security expelled him just one week before production was due to begin. Premiering at Sundance Film Festival on the first day of Donald Trump’s first presidency, the film was interpreted by American audiences not as a story about Egypt, but as a story about themselves. Hollywood, he said, called two days later, envious not of the budget, but of the freedom he had enjoyed: the fact that no one had told him what to do. When he was offered double the budget for Boy from Heaven in exchange for a platform-only release — with no Cannes or no theatrical release — he refused. Europe’s competitive advantage, he concluded, is not financial. Europe is freedom, and that is worth defending.

Across legal analysis, cultural policy, production experience and artistic practice, all four speakers pointed to the same conclusion: the revision of the AVMSD is not merely a technical exercise. The rules Europe writes now will determine whether the continent remains a space where reliable information circulates freely, where diverse stories can be told authentically and where creative freedom remains essential.