HBO Max has agreed to dedicate a part of its necessary funding in French and European content material to documentaries and animation, adopting new French sub-quota guidelines that competing streamers are difficult in court docket.
The deal places HBO Max on a distinct path from Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+, which every filed an attraction earlier than the Council of State, France’s highest court docket, claiming the subquotas have been launched with out adequate negotiation and impose obligations on streaming providers that conventional broadcasters don’t face in the identical approach. Pauline Dauvin, vice-president of content material at Netflix in France, even described them as detrimental to editorial freedom in an article revealed within the newspaper Le Monde.
The dispute stems from a change to the French decree often called SMAD, the native implementation of an EU directive that triggered world streaming providers working in France to start investing 20% of their native revenues in European and French-speaking movie and tv manufacturing since 2021.
Then on the finish of 2025, France went additional with new guidelines aimed particularly at making certain that genres comparable to animation and documentary additionally profit from the rising funding from streamers.
On this context, HBO Max has chosen to enter into agreements with French industrial firms, together with SACD, the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques; SCAM, the Civil Society of Multimedia Authors; USPA, representing audiovisual producers; AnimFrance; and the unbiased producers union SPI, amongst others.
The exact quantities dedicated to the totally different genres shall be decided based mostly on the platform’s 2026 and 2027 monetary years.
“These agreements mirror our want to proceed our dedication to French creation and to develop productions able to resonating with French and worldwide audiences,” declared Erlinda Tabla, vice-president of authorized and industrial affairs at WBD France.
“We’re happy to have established, with the skilled organizations SACD and SCAM, a typical framework which is able to permit us to proceed this dialogue within the years to come back and to contribute to the worldwide affect of French audiovisual creation,” she continued.
The French authorities and manufacturing firms have defended subquotas as a method to extra equitably distribute streaming investments throughout the audiovisual ecosystem, significantly within the animation sector which has suffered from slower commissioning and is threatened with job losses because of the rise of AI.
Isabelle Degeorges, CEO of Gaumont Télévision and president of USPA, mentioned the settlement with HBO Max “opens new horizons for audiovisual creation.”
“This demonstrates the vitality of our business and our potential to discover new inventive frontiers. This is good news for our producers, our writers and our expertise, in addition to for the renewal of French and European creativity,” she continued.
Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, president of SPI and producer of the animated function movie “Rooster for Linda!” », declared that this settlement “contributes to recognizing the important position of documentary and animation” and “marks a brand new stage within the integration of streaming platforms into the French inventive ecosystem whereas additional increasing the audiences of our works”.