Four types of video-on-demand markets: Comparing the development of European VoD

Abstract

The European video-on-demand (VoD) market has grown rapidly over the past decade, but differences across European nations persist. While the US-based globally operating players Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ dominate the subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) market, VoD services emerging from the legacy media industries and funded by means other than subscription shaped the early development of the European VoD market. This article maps and compares the development of the VoD market within the European Union with a focus on the idiosyncrasies in uptake and offer of VoD in different countries. Building on previous studies of national media systems, the article develops four comparative dimensions for the case of the European VoD market and operationalizes them using quantitative data from the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) and Eurostat from the period 2016–22. The comparative data analysis results in a grouping of countries, according to similar levels of market penetration and diversity of catalogue and content offers, while accounting for differences in size, concentration in the SVoD market and levels of market intervention within these clusters. These four types of VoD market development offer a contextualization to nation or service-specific case studies of players in the European market and a basis for hypotheses to explain these differences.