Imagine financing the construction of a house. You pay the architect, cover every bill, carry all the risk. And then, once it stands, the law steps in and hands the keys to someone else.
That is the paradox at the heart of the MedienInvestVG, the draft law meant to strengthen German film. It sets out to build something – a stronger German production sector – yet it would undermine the very thing it is supposed to create. It would hand the finished work to those who did not carry the risk of making it. It would do so against the wishes of the very audiences it claims to serve, who reject it by two to one. And for all that, it cannot even guarantee that productions are actually made in Germany – meaning the house is being built somewhere else. No wonder that one of the country's most eminent constitutional lawyers has inspected the plans and found them unsound. Good intentions do not make good law.
We at Amazon know what it takes to build, because we have been doing it in Germany for years. Amazon is one of the largest investors in the country. Last week, Amazon announced plans to invest more than €16 billion in Germany in 2027, building on over €100 billion since 2010. Prime Video is part of that commitment, with a major new German production slate for 2027 – alongside returning hits like Maxton Hall and LOL: Last One Laughing.
This is not new for Amazon, which launched Prime Video in Germany in 2014, two years before the global rollout, and in 2017 became the first streaming service to produce a German Original – You Are Wanted, starring Matthias Schweighöfer. Since then, Prime Video’s German titles have reached audiences worldwide. Prime Video invests in German stories because audiences want them – and is ready to build more.
So our concern is not with investment itself. Our concern is with how this particular law is built. No European rule forced Germany to legislate this way. It is a political choice. And as drafted, it gets the building wrong in three ways.
Why the law fails
At its core, the law requires streaming services to invest at least 8% of the revenue they earn in Germany into European productions. It is not the figure alone that is the problem, but everything built around it.
1. The law takes the keys from whoever paid for the house
First, it takes the keys from whoever paid for the house. Normally, the streaming service that commissions and finances a production holds the rights to show it – in cinema, on television, on streaming, and beyond. It carries the full financial risk and absorbs the loss if a title fails, while the producer – the contractor hired to do the building – is paid either way. This law changes that. After just a few years, those rights – the keys to the house – pass to the producer instead. The catch is how it gets there. In Germany, the majority of film and series productions are co-financed through public funding — this is standard industry practice. The law treats these public subsidies as if they were the producer's own financial contribution. The higher this credited share, the sooner the rights revert to the producer. Since public funding routinely covers a not insignificant portion of production costs across the industry, the service can lose its exclusive rights in many cases after just seven years. In other words, the one who paid for the house and bore the risk must hand over the keys to the one who did neither. That is not an incentive to invest. It is a deterrent.
2. No one builds a house on those terms – and the law makes the terms harder still.
Second, no one builds a house on those terms – and the law makes the terms harder still. Change the incentive and you change the behaviour. When the rules say you must put up the investment and carry the risk while others are handed the keys, the rational response is to build less, not more.
The law then makes those terms harder in two further ways. First, it dictates not just how much you must spend, but on what: the money must be split in fixed shares – at least 80% on German-language productions, at least 70% on films made by independent producers, at least 60% on brand-new works. Second, it adds new duties to report, document, and have the spending checked. Each rule narrows the room to make a good film, and adds paperwork to make it at all. The result is not more German stories, but fewer – the opposite of what the law intends, and, for a government that wants to cut red tape, the opposite of what it promised.
3. The law cannot even ensure the house is built in Germany.
Third, it cannot even ensure the house is built in Germany. Suppose a service does invest, in full and on time. Even then, the law misses its own goal – because it cannot require that the money is actually spent in Germany. Under EU rules, Germany may only require investment in European works, not German ones. So a series shot in Prague, Budapest or Madrid satisfies the law just as well as one shot in Berlin – and producers will keep working wherever conditions are most favourable. A law meant to strengthen German production cannot, in the end, require a single scene to be filmed on German ground.
This is the deepest flaw of all. The law still imposes very real costs – the rights it takes away, the shares it dictates,
the paperwork it adds. But it cannot deliver the one thing those costs are meant to buy. Germany's film sector carries the burden; the production it is supposed to attract can land anywhere in Europe. That is the worst of both worlds: a real price paid at home, for a promise the law has no power to keep.
It is not just us who see it this way
Amazon would say all this, of course – Prime Video has a stake in the outcome. All the more telling, then, that two weighty voices reach the same conclusion: the European Commission and the constitutional lawyer Udo Di Fabio, who served twelve years as a justice of the Federal Constitutional Court and today holds a chair in public law at the University of Bonn.
Both have examined the draft – and both conclude it goes too far. Where we criticise it as unfair and ineffective, they go a step further – they consider it disproportionate and unlawful. Not because of the 8% quota alone, but because of everything piled on top: the fixed sub-quotas, the forced reversion of rights, and no way to balance investments across several years.
In his legal opinion, Di Fabio reaches a clear conclusion: the statutory reversion of rights interferes disproportionately with the providers’ property rights and violates the constitutional prohibition of excess. The thinking behind it: whoever finances a production and carries the risk loses their rights and must hand them over to a third party. Di Fabio describes such an interference as “tantamount to expropriation”. What is decisive for him is that milder ways to achieve the goal would exist – yet the draft chooses the harshest one. For this reason, he considers the law, in its current form, unconstitutional.
The European Commission reached the same place. In a letter of 6 August 2026, it called on the German government to fundamentally revise the draft, warning that the combined effect of all the measures together is disproportionate.
The consequence goes beyond the principle. A law widely seen as unconstitutional will almost certainly be challenged by the industry – and that means years of uncertainty for everyone trying to plan and invest in German production in the meantime.
Give us rules worth building on
So the picture is consistent from every side: the law would deter the very investment it seeks, the experts judge it unlawful, and the public does not want it. In a representative survey of 1,000 German consumers (October 2026), 78% said audience demand, not government, should decide what gets made – and once people were told what the law contains, they opposed it two to one. This is a verdict politics should take seriously, not ignore.
Amazon wants to invest in Germany. We already do – voluntarily and substantially. It would be best if politics stopped this law altogether. But if it does come, at least the worst must be defused: reform the forced transfer of rights (at minimum a streaming carve-out so services keep the rights their business depends on), stop treating public funding as the producer's own contribution, and make the quotas flexible enough to balance investments across years.
Prime Video will keep building German stories. Just don't ask us to hand over the keys to a house we paid for. Give us a framework that rewards the commitment – not one that undermines it.
