Peppa Pig drives UK to remain Europe’s VOD top dog
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 02 February 2021
Despite Brexit, the UK’s video industry has very much to date remained a huge part of Europe with TV and film providers being very successful in taking their wares to an eager European video on-demand audience, as shown clearly by data from the European Audiovisual Observatory.

The research body’s latest VOD market study showed that overall in 46 European countries there were 446,800 film presences and 65,100 TV season presences on VOD at the end of November 2020.

A total of 12,659 unique European TV seasons were available on VOD in Europe, and of these 12,309 had a European country as main producer. The UK (44%), Germany (17%), France (9%) and Spain (6%) together provided the majority of all available European TV titles on VOD. Only 12% of all European TV content available were co-productions, which was significantly lower than for films (30%), but when looking only at majority European productions, the observatory found that the share of co-productions fell to 9%. The main secondary co-production countries were the US and Canada, but looking only at European minority co-producers, Germany, France and the UK were the main partners in co-production.

The UK was the main provider and exporter of TV content as it produced half of all European TV seasons available on VOD in Europe and British titles dominated the top 20 European TV seasons most found in the 462 VOD catalogues analysed, with half of the titles being produced by or co-produced with the United Kingdom. Almost half of the top 20 titles were animation, nine out of twenty, and Denmark provided 20% of the top 20 titles with four seasons of the same animated series.

UK to EU livestock export limitations notwithstanding, British animation series Peppa Pig (season 1) was the top TV title present in VOD catalogues in Europe. This series also represented the oldest content in the list of top 20 TV seasons. The TV series with the largest number of available seasons were two British classics: quiz show Have I Got News For You (60 seasons) and soap Coronation Street (59 seasons) and the oldest TV content available was David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest series, from 1954. Although 60% of TV content was less than 10 years old, the average year of production of all TV seasons found on VOD in Europe was 1987.