The European Audiovisual Industry and the Digital Single Market : Trends, Issues and Policies

New players emerge in the audiovisual industry and offer unprecedented solutions for aggregating and distributing content. New entrants, especially social networks, have been the engines of these changes toward multitasking, multi-screening behaviours. The way of accessing and interacting with content has changed. Over the last three decades, the European Commission has been watching carefully the evolution of the media and content industries with the goal to foster growth and innovation of digital content services in the European Union, while at the same time protecting consumers in a harmonised fashion.The paper contrasts the global trends of the market, the features of the dual EU audiovisual markets with some of the recent proposals of the European Commission in the backdrop of its numerous initiatives of the last decades