Total expenditure on original content in Europe, excluding news and sports, hit €22 billion ($24.2 billion) in 2023, a 7.8 percent gain on the previous year.

The new figures reflect a slowdown post the pandemic rebound, when content investments surged from €15.2 billion ($16.7 billion) in 2020 to €20.4 billion ($22.3 billion) in 2022. The European Audiovisual Observatory tracked content spend by streamers and channels in the EU, Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iceland, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the Republic of Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, the U.K. and Ukraine.

The global streamers spent €5.7 billion ($6.3 billion) on European originals last year, a 34 percent increase on 2022. While growth has slowed, the global streamers still account for some 26 percent of all spending on European original content. And much of that investment is going to the U.K. and Spain, which together accounted for 53 percent of global streamers’ spending on original European content.

Scripted programming still dominates streamer spending on original content at some 80 percent, with most of that on series and just 10 percent on films.