Cute cat videos, fried chicken clips and viral dances could soon help to finance Belgian TV, with the Flanders government on the verge of passing laws to force TikTok and YouTube to share revenues with local television producers.
“Politically speaking, it is important in audiovisual and media services that there are obligations on companies to invest in local TV content,” the media minister for the Flemish government, Benjamin Dalle, told the Guardian.
Belgium already takes a cut of revenues generated by Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, but Dalle said TikTok and YouTube were so popular that it was important that they also paid their way.
“What we are doing now in Flanders is to also make video-sharing platforms like YouTube, like TikTok, like Meta [the owner of Facebook and Instagram] pay for locally-made content, and we are modifying Flemish legislation in order to do so. Internationally, it is the first time this has happened,” he said.
Big tech firms have already raised concerns about the move, and the US ambassador in Brussels has written to the government about the development. “We have received several letters from these companies because it is a precedent, a world’s first,” Dalle said.
The proposed laws will go to a vote within the next few weeks and, if adopted, it will mean more cash for a thriving sector that has recently produced dramas such as Knokke Off, known as High Tides in the UK – a glitzy local teen drama set in the eponymous upmarket seaside town – and Rough Diamonds, a family crime drama centring on the return of a prodigal son to the orthodox Jewish community in Antwerp.
Hidden Assets, a co-production commissioned by Screen Ireland and Screen Flanders starring Angeline Ball and set in Limerick and Antwerp, will be recognisable to many in the UK and Ireland.
And with Belgium being holders of the rotating presidency of the EU, Dalle said he was hoping to extend the idea across the bloc: “I would like to put this on the European agenda.”
Under the proposals, video-sharing platforms would have to put between 2% and 4% of their revenues into the Flanders Audiovisual Fund or directly into a local production.
Streamers including Netflix and broadband and cable TV suppliers are already subjected to a similar rule, with €7m (£6m) generated in 2023 for local productions including Over Water, a two-season thriller about a TV celebrity lured into the world of cocaine gangs on the Antwerp docks part-funded by Telenet, a local broadband firm.
• This article was amended on 22 January 2024. Benjamin Dalle is the media minister for the Flemish government, not the culture minister for the Belgian government as an earlier version suggested.
