Last month, the German government announced that it was planning a new set of measures for streaming services and TV networks to protect and boost its domestic content industry. Just before the start of the Berlinale, the German production industry celebrated both the introduction of a quota that requires global streamers and domestic TV stations to invest at least 8% of their annual net turnover in content that supports the German production sector, and the announcement of a €250M yearly public financial support for films. This echoes a survey we conducted a few weeks back, looking at content preferences among European audiences. 52% of the respondents in Germany claimed to watch domestic content very often; that’s 5 points less than French audiences and 13 points less than British viewers. Only 5% of respondents in Germany claimed never to watch local content, while this proportion rises to 12% for other European content and 15% for US content. The popularity of German content is quite consistent across 18- to 55-year-old cohorts, with around 47% of consumers reporting that they “very often” consume domestic productions, compared to 58% of German viewers older than 56. Overall, younger audiences in Germany watch twice as much international content as older viewers. Access to non-German titles is predominantly on global streaming services, primarily Netflix, which has the most diversified library in terms of production origins. The popularity of Japanese and Korean titles is most prevalent among 26-35 year olds (23% of them watch Japanese content “very often”, 15% for Korean titles), and Netflix is by far the most comprehensive catalogue among generalist platforms for East Asian content fans. At the end of 2025, Netflix in Germany gave access to more than 600 Japanese and 450 Korean titles, totalling almost 11k hours of content.
