SAA Flash Report: Authors receive 0.53% of €141B European AV market
News
4 February 2026
The European audiovisual market and authors' royalties
February 2026
Publications
Valued at €141 billion, the European audiovisual media sector is one of the continent's most valuable cultural and economic assets. Yet non-European players dominate the streaming market, capturing 89% of non-traditional audiovisual revenues. Meanwhile, screenwriters and directors face fragmented rights and uneven royalties across media and countries.
This first edition of the annual SAA Flash Report offers insight into the European audiovisual market and the royalties collected by SAA collective management organisations. SAA members represent and enforce audiovisual authors’ rights by negotiating licensing agreements with users such as broadcasters, retransmission operators and streaming platforms, collect the royalties due for the use of the works, and distribute them to the authors. This enables authors to be paid, while providing efficient licensing solutions that contribute to the growth of the audiovisual market. In the EU, CMOs are regulated by the 2014 Collective Rights Management Directive.
Market at a glance
The European audiovisual (AV) media sector, encompassing cinema, television and on-demand services, is one of Europe's most valuable cultural and economic assets.
The sector plays a crucial role in making audiovisual works available to audiences and shaping cultural identity. Yet while the sector's overall value continues to grow, US-based companies have come to dominate the online and streaming market, capturing the vast majority of revenues from subscription video-on-demand and advertising-funded services.
European broadcasters, both public and private, remain the primary commissioners of original fiction, but the balance of economic power in digital distribution has shifted decisively towards non-European players.
SAA at a glance
SAA members’ collections
Screenwriters and directors are at the heart of the creative ecosystem, yet their royalties vary widely across media and countries. The EU-harmonised collective management of retransmission rights in the 1990s, increased authors' revenues. However, this doesn't apply to all types of exploitation, so the scope of collectively managed rights varies by country. Fragmented legislation prevents authors to receive royalties for all uses of their works across all European markets.
Although collections for on-demand and online uses continued to grow in 2024, exceeding €100 million for the first time, they still represented only 13% of the total. This contrasts with the current market reality, in which streaming is a major consumption model for audiovisual works.
