TBI Tech & Analysis: Unpacking Netflix & Amazon viewer tastes in Spain

Spain has become a hot topic of conversation for those in the global content business, with its domestic shows such as La Casa De Papel reaching huge audience via streamers.

It provides an interesting contrast to the flow of content from America. Before MIPTV, we explored how US shows have been declining in demand across Europe based on findings from a recent report The World & The US: The Rise of International OTT Platforms Is Changing The Balance Of Programming In Europe.

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

Spanish spotlight

For Spain, the report showed that audiences had the highest proportion of viewing to EU content in the FIGSUK, but the country also consumes a diverse variety of content, with shows from Europe and the US, but also Lat Am.

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

When focusing solely on non-US content (excluding Japanese titles), Spanish content holds a 42% share of views in the country. Following that are typical suppliers like the UK, Canada and France, while South Korea also holds a significant share.

Amazon vs Netflix

The status of local viewing makes the strategies of Netflix and Amazon – the country’s two most subscribed SVOD’s – of even more interest.

Both streamers have embarked on different tactics to attract viewers. Local originals for Amazon make up more than a third of viewing in Spain, while if combined with US originated programming, only about 5% of Amazon’s viewing goes to shows from other countries.

Netflix, meanwhile, has only 17% of its view share in Spain going to local original programming, around a half of Amazon’s share.

Once the US view share is accounted for, 27% of Netflix’s viewing – or about five times that of Amazon – goes to content from other countries.

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

Increases for Spanish view share were also up: Amazon, by 23.6 points, and a touch over six percentage points for Netflix.

(Data above was collected from the TV Time app. Samples were balanced in each country by age and gender to reflect each country’s population. ‘View Share’ is defined as the portion of all views, for selected filter criteria, belonging to a specific piece of content.)