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Comment by julesie | Hacker News Reader

How can this work in practice? Can the 30% be from any EU country?

I'm Irish, we don't produce that much stuff. If it has to represent 30% of the catalogue, that catalogue is going to have to shrink massively.

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Yeah, I'm failing to see the practice behind this as well.

It was big news in Croatia that Netflix got a local TV show available in its catalogue a few months ago (The Paper, AKA Novine in Croatian). As far as I can tell, it remains the only one.

In practice, does that mean that Netflix would have to reduce their Croatian catalogue to like three shows until they purchase the rights to reproduce additional domestic ones?

The source[0] for the info just says "local content" (unlike techcrunch which adds "made in each EU country where a service is provided", but I can't find that detail anywhere else) and also says that Netflix is already close to this percentage, so I think it can be from anywhere in the EU.

[0]https://variety.com/2018/film/news/netflix-amazon-local-prod...

Perhaps Netflix can just hire some people to produce some documentary content about Ireland? But then, this will have the adverse effect of having a large part of Ireland's film and television industry controlled by Netflix et all.

It can't work mathematically unless it is from any EU country. There are more than 3 EU countries, which means that eventually you will get some great content from some other country that you are not allowed to access. That is 30% Irish, 30% French, 30% German, and 30% Italian content already doesn't add up, meaning some things that you personally might want from a different country are on the list of things you are not allowed to access even though the streaming provider you are on has all rights.

If it can be from any EU country, then the country will be France. France already has laws like this and has historically invested in their content industry, so it should be (should) fairly easy to license that content and fills the requirements.

Once you have an amazon.com account, you magically also have an amazon.de account, and an amazon.it account... and it's a few clicks to switch in the app. Maybe that's how it'll go?

maybe. However in most countries the courts tend to see through such things. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon doesn't risk this loophole. If they do (even accidentally) I expect some lawyer will sue - there are a bunch of EU countries to choose which to sue in, the results might be different in each.

I interpreted it as saying that, if you are in a specific European country, 30% of the content must be from that country you are in.

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