The New Framework for Audiovisual Production in Spain: Minority or Minoritised Languages?
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Palgrave Macmillan
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Abstract
LexCAV is a research project about the impact of the Spanish Audiovisual Communication Law 13/2022 on linguistic and cultural diversity. Emerging from a symposium held in 2022 in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), LexCAV analyses European communication policies and their various national implementations, offering a quantitative and qualitative assessment of independent audiovisual production in those territories with co-official languages. The particular focus of this chapter is Law 13/2022’s mistreatment of independent producers and its limited approach to gender equality, as well as underlining the law’s insufficient quotas for audiovisual content in minority languages: only 6% of video-on-demand content in co-official languages, with a minimum of 0.6% per language. We also argue that Law 13/2022 incurs a comparative disadvantage between local and global VOD services, in which dominant platforms in the Spanish market (such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video) are not subject to the same obligations as local providers. However, the lack of transparency in the data on percentages of content broadcast in different languages makes it difficult to accurately assess compliance with legal requirements. The chapter concludes that Law 13/2022, although intended to protect minority languages, lacks clarity, applicability and ambition, and does not adequately address the challenges posed by the current globalisation of audiences, thus contributing decisively to perpetuating the minoritisation of non-hegemonic audiovisual cultures.
Description
This chapter is the result of the research project "LexCAV: The impact of the current Law 13/2022 on the audiovisual industry project is funded by the State Research Agency / Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Spain): ref. PID2022-142353OB-I00" and has been included as chapter 9 of the collective and open access book "The Politics of Place. Space and Locality in the European Screen Industries". Profound transformations in the ways media products are produced, distributed and consumed caused by digital technologies that have ‘disrupted’ established business models, markets and relationships, has led to a renewed interest in the industry’s spatial patterning and hence the importance of place in which locality, paradoxically in an era of globalisation, has been seen as having heightened significance. This renewed interest in space and location – sometimes characterised as the ‘spatial turn’ in media studies – has become a particularly pressing and urgent issue across Europe over the last decade as the effects of digital disruption become more pervasive. In an era of the increasing internationalisation of media production and an orientation to global markets, policy makers have recognised the importance of preserving, even enhancing this spatial plurality. As many studies have shown, the strength and influence of Public Service Media, – which have traditionally embraced this role of cultural identity-building, albeit with mixed results – has weakened in the face of increasingly powerful alternative providers: satellite channels or streaming platforms. These competitors, such as Sky or Netflix, operate to a global commercial logic in which ‘territories’ – not defined by either established national or regional boundaries – are conceived as markets not cultures. This new logic does not entirely displace or supersede the older logics of analogue broadcasting but introduces new layers of spatial complexity that need to be investigated and analysed. This wide-ranging collection seeks to address these ‘layers of spatial complexity’ through a series of interconnected chapters investigating and analysing the importance of place, space and locality across the breadth of Europe from Greenland to Romania. Although the collection attends to the paradoxes and contradictions of space, place and locality revealed by detailed investigation, it is inspiredby the desire to identify, and find ways of valuing, the various strategies, practices and specific productions that resist homogenisation, ones that encourage plurality and sustainable growth and which contribute to the European cultural ideal of unity in diversity.
Bibliographic citation
Castelló-Mayo, E., Méndez-Fernández, R., López-Gómez, A.M. (2026). The New Framework for Audiovisual Production in Spain: Minority or Minoritised Languages?. In: Spicer, A., Barton, R., Genders, A. (eds) The Politics of Place. Palgrave Studies in European Communication Research and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06780-7_8
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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-06780-7_8Sponsors
Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España)
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© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access: This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.