Netflix Gets Drawn Into Spain’s Language Politics in Budget Deal
Netflix Gets Drawn Into Spain’s Language Politics in Budget Deal
(Bloomberg) -- Netflix, HBO and other streaming platforms got caught up in Spain’s complex cultural politics as the question of how much content gets streamed in languages such as Basque became an issue in budget talks.
To seal the support of a Catalan nationalist party for his spending plan that’s set to win approval in parliament today, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez agreed to its demand for quotas for programing in languages other than Spanish on streaming platforms.
Under the agreement with Esquerra Republicana, 6% of all content on such platforms will have to be in one of the three languages of Basque, Catalan or Galician. The quotas are part of a broader system that requires a minimum amount of their programing in Spain to be produced in Europe.
Roughly one in five of Spain’s population of 47 million speak a so-called co-official language at home and are fully bilingual, according to central and regional government data. Catalan is the most widely used, with about 6.8 million speakers. Some 1 million people speak Basque and 1.3 million speak Galician.
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