Spain has become a hot topic of conversation for players in the global content industry, with its national shows such as The House Of Papel reach a large audience via streamers.

It provides an interesting contrast to the flow of content from America. Ahead of MIPTV, we explored the drop in demand for US shows across Europe based on the findings of a recent report The world and the United States: the rise of international OTT platforms is changing the balance of programming in Europe.

The document, produced by licensing and data company Whip Media and MIPTV, used data collected by TV Time (an app that has more than one million active monthly users in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK (FIGSUK)) and found that over the past three years, US content has declined by an average of 10% as a share of the overall audience in these territories.

Sharing views in Spain

Spanish projector

For Spain, the report showed that audiences had the highest proportion of European content viewing in FIGSUK, but the country also consumes a wide variety of content, with shows from Europe and the United States, but also from Latin America.

Spaniards have recently seen their share of local content viewing rise, as well as one of the steepest declines for US programming, behind France alone.

Focusing only on non-US content (excluding Japanese titles), Spanish content holds a 42% share of views in the country. This is followed by typical suppliers like the UK, Canada and France, while South Korea also holds a large share.

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Amazon versus Netflix

The status of local viewing makes the strategies of Netflix and Amazon – the two most subscribed SVODs in the country – all the more interesting.

The two streamers have embarked on different tactics to attract viewers. Local Amazon originals account for more than a third of viewing in Spain, while if combined with programs of American origin, only around 5% of Amazon viewing goes to shows from other countries.

Netflix, meanwhile, only has 17% of its viewing share in Spain devoted to local original programming, roughly half of Amazon’s share.

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When the US viewing share is taken into account, 27% of Netflix viewing – roughly five times that of Amazon – goes to content from other countries.

US content continues to decline in popularity on streamers, with view share for Amazon down nearly 24% from 2019 figures and nearly 20 percentage points for Netflix.

Increases in Spanish view share also increased: Amazon, by 23.6 points, and a touch of more than six percentage points for Netflix.

(The data above was collected from the TV Time app. The samples were balanced in each country based on age and gender to reflect each country’s population. “View sharing” is defined as the share of all views, for the selected filter criteria, belonging to a specific piece of content.)