Fee on streaming giants invested in Swiss films and series
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Fee on streaming giants invested in Swiss films and series
The revised Film Act obliges companies with TV and on-demand services to invest a portion of their revenue into Swiss filmmaking. Figures for 2024 show, they will have to spend CHF30.1 million (about $37 million) on local productions.
The revised Film Act, also known as “Lex Netflix”, obliges companies with TV and on-demand services to spend 4% of their revenue on domestic filmmaking. Foreign streaming services such as Netflix, Disney or Amazon, as well as German or French TV channels with Swiss advertising slots, are affected. The law has been in force since January 1, 2024.
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According to a document published by the Federal Office of Culture (FOC) on Saturday, this investment obligation affects 21 companies. These include international streaming platforms, global tech companies as well as Swiss telecoms providers, private broadcasters and on-demand services.
In 2024, these companies generated a total turnover of CHF752 million. This results in an investment obligation of CHF30.1 million. According to the document, CHF15.9 million of this has already been effectively invested. This leaves a “deferred” CHF14.2 million that they still have to invest by 2027.
Visible effects
The projects that benefited from the investments include Landesverräter, seasons three and four of Tschugger and the series Winter Palace.
It is still too early to assess the impact of the investment obligation on the Swiss film industry, wrote FOC Director Carine Bachmann when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency. According to her, the effects are already visible, even though the measure has only just been introduced.
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Of the “effective investments”, CHF9.3 million have been invested in the acquisition and production of films, CHF4.9 million have been invested by television stations in their promotion, CHF1.3 million have gone to film festivals “to strengthen film culture”. Finally, CHf400,000 were spent on copyrights.
As far as the format is concerned, the slightly larger part of the CHF9.3 million francs was invested in films, namely CHF5 million francs and CHF4.2 million was spent on series.
Adapted from German by DeepL/ac
The headline of this article has
The title of this article was amended on August 11, 2025. An initial version claimed that “Lex Netflix” leads to a tax.
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