What It Does
This legislation requires major streaming services to invest in new Australian content for the first time.
The core requirement: Streaming platforms with 1 million+ Australian subscribers must spend at least 10% of their total program expenditure on new Australian commissions or first-release acquisitions.
Alternatively, they can opt to spend 7.5% of their Australian revenue instead.
Platforms must elect one method or the other. The revenue option exists at 75% of the expenditure threshold to accommodate different business models and provide flexibility for platforms whose program expenditure may be difficult to calculate or verify.
Who’s Affected
Services expected to be captured: Netflix, Stan, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Paramount+, Binge, and Apple TV+ (once it reaches threshold).
Services with 250,000+ subscribers must notify the ACMA, even if not yet subject to the full obligation.
What’s Excluded:
- Small platforms: Any service with fewer than one million Australian subscribers is exempt.
- User-generated platforms: Services where the primary content is uploaded by users rather than commissioned or acquired by the platform are explicitly excluded. TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram are not captured by this legislation.
- Limited appeal services: Niche or specialty streaming services are excluded. This covers services offering content only to a special interest audience (such as a particular sport, hobby, or professional field), content available only in limited geographic locations within Australia, content available only for a limited time period, or programs that would have limited appeal to the general Australian public. This exemption ensures the obligations target mainstream entertainment platforms rather than specialist services like fitness apps, educational platforms, or niche hobby content providers.
What Counts as Eligible Content
Drama, children’s programs, documentaries, arts programs, and educational content. News and sports are excluded.
Reality TV is explicitly excluded. The legislation specifically states that programs depicting “actual, contemporary events, people or situations in a dramatic or entertaining way, where there is a heavy emphasis on dramatic impact or entertainment value” do not qualify. Quiz and game shows are also excluded.
How Expenditure Is Calculated
Total program expenditure includes all money spent on acquiring or commissioning programs for the Australian service, excluding news and sport. Critically, it must include a proportionate share of “global content” – programs like The Crown, Stranger Things, or The Mandalorian that are produced for worldwide release rather than licensed specifically for Australia.
Each platform must ascribe a “transfer price” to this global content reflecting what it would reasonably cost to license for the Australian market. This prevents platforms from claiming minimal Australian-specific expenditure and avoiding their obligations.
Qualifying expenditure (what counts towards meeting the requirement) includes amounts spent on commissioning new Australian content or acquiring first-release Australian content. The content must not have been previously available to Australian audiences, with an exception for theatrical film releases.
Production budget contributions, licence fees, and commissioning payments all count. However, government offset contributions are also included, which reduces the platforms’ net investment (see “Critical Gaps” below).
How “Australian” Is Defined (from ACCTS 2020)
The SVOD bill adopts the existing definition of “Australian program” from the Broadcasting Services (Australian Content and Children’s Television) Standards 2020, which applies to free-to-air broadcasters. This is a creative control test, not a subject matter test.
To qualify as an Australian program, content must be produced under the creative control of Australians, meaning the producer must be Australian (citizen or permanent resident), either the director or writer must be Australian, at least 50% of leading actors or on-screen presenters must be Australian, for drama 75% of the major supporting cast must be Australian, and the program must be produced and post-produced in Australia (though it can be filmed elsewhere).
For animated programs, at least three of five specified creative roles must be filled by Australians: production designer, character designer, supervising layout artist, supervising storyboard artist, or key background artist.
Official co-productions made under government-to-government agreements count as Australian content. New Zealand programs also qualify under the CER Trade in Services Protocol, reflecting the close economic relationship between the two countries.
Documentary is defined under ACCTS as “a creative treatment of actuality” but explicitly excludes news, current affairs, sports coverage, magazine programs, infotainment, and light entertainment.
Drama under ACCTS requires a fully or partially scripted screenplay with dramatic elements of character, theme and plot forming a narrative structure. It includes sketch comedy, animated drama, and dramatised documentary. Critically, it excludes programs involving only “incidental use of actors,” which reinforces the exclusion of reality formats.
Practical Impact for Workers
The Impact Analysis estimates this will require $175-200 million annually in new Australian content investment, translating to roughly 48-53 hours of new content per year across all regulated platforms.
Current voluntary spending by five SVODs averaged $333.5 million annually (2021-2024), but this includes acquisitions of older catalogue content. The new rules specifically target new commissions and first-release content.
Catalogue content doesn’t count. Only new commissions and first-release acquisitions qualify. Content already available to Australian audiences cannot be used to meet the obligation. However, there’s an exception for films that had a theatrical cinema release before streaming.
Flexibility Built In
A three-year carry-over period allows streamers to balance investment across production cycles, acknowledging that expenditure can be lumpy depending on when productions are in principal photography versus development.
Shortfalls can be carried forward and made up in subsequent years. Excess expenditure can be carried forward for up to two years.
No genre sub-quotas are imposed, so streamers can choose how to allocate their spend across eligible genres.
Reporting and Administration
Each regulated streaming service will need to establish compliance infrastructure. The regulatory impact analysis estimates compliance costs of $1.17 million annually across the seven affected platforms, suggesting each service will require dedicated personnel to manage reporting obligations.
Reports must be submitted to the ACMA within 45 days of each reporting year’s end, detailing program expenditure, Australian revenue, subscriber numbers, and qualifying Australian content expenditure.
Penalties and Enforcement
The ACMA administers the scheme with significant enforcement powers.
For failure to meet expenditure requirements: The penalty can be the greater of 10,000 penalty units (currently $3.13 million) OR 10 times the unacquitted expenditure requirement. For an SVOD with a $20 million annual obligation that fails to comply, this could mean penalties exceeding $200 million.
Critically, paying the penalty does not erase the obligation. The unmet expenditure requirement continues to carry over, potentially triggering further penalties each year until acquitted.
For failure to report or notify: 60 penalty units for corporations, 12 for individuals. Continuing contraventions attract separate penalties for each day of non-compliance.
Enforcement tools available to ACMA: Formal warnings, infringement notices, enforceable undertakings, remedial directions, injunctions, and civil penalty proceedings in the Federal Court.
Anti-avoidance provisions allow ACMA to make determinations where transactions are not at arm’s length, or where corporate restructuring appears designed to circumvent the obligations.
Statutory Review
A review must commence four years after the scheme begins, examining its operation, effectiveness and implications. This provides an opportunity to address any issues or strengthen requirements based on actual data.
Critical Gaps and Concerns
1. Government Offsets Reduce Real Investment
The headline 10% figure is misleading. Government production incentives count towards the expenditure requirement, substantially reducing what streamers actually pay out of pocket.
Australian productions typically access the Producer Offset (40% rebate for theatrical features, 30% for television drama and other formats), the Location Offset (30% for large-budget productions filming in Australia), or the PDV Offset (30% for post, digital and visual effects work).
In practice, this means a television drama production with a 30% Producer Offset sees the streamer’s net cash contribution reduced accordingly. Productions that also access the Location Offset see even greater reductions. The actual new private investment flowing into Australian production is likely to be significantly below the headline figures.
This effectively transfers the cost of meeting streamer obligations partially onto Australian taxpayers through existing screen incentive programs.
2. No Provisions for Artificial Intelligence
Neither the SVOD bill nor the underlying ACCTS 2020 standards contain any provisions addressing artificial intelligence in production.
The ACCTS definitions assume human creators throughout. The creative control test specifies that the producer, director, writer, actors, and (for animation) designers must be Australian citizens or permanent residents. There is no consideration of AI-generated scripts or AI writing assistance, synthetic voices or AI voice cloning, AI-generated visual effects, backgrounds, or characters, deep fakes or digital recreations of performers, AI-assisted animation or “AI actors”, or any threshold for how much AI involvement disqualifies a production.
There are no disclosure requirements whatsoever. Productions are not required to declare whether AI tools were used in writing, production, or post-production. Audiences have no right to know if content was AI-generated or AI-assisted.
This is a significant oversight given the rapid advancement of generative AI tools since ACCTS 2020 commenced. A production could theoretically use AI to generate scripts, clone voices, and create synthetic performances while still meeting the technical requirements for “Australian creative control” if the credited humans are Australian – even if those humans are primarily supervising AI systems rather than performing creative work themselves.
The four-year statutory review provides an opportunity to address this gap, but considerable AI integration into production workflows will occur before then.
3. No Genre Sub-quotas
Despite significant advocacy from the documentary and children’s production sectors, there are no minimum requirements for specific genres. Streamers could theoretically meet their entire obligation through drama alone, leaving documentary and children’s content vulnerable.
4. Major Platforms Excluded
The exclusion of user-generated platforms means some of the largest distributors of video content in Australia face no local content obligations whatsoever. TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram collectively reach more Australians than traditional streaming services, yet remain entirely unregulated in this space.
Context
Australia joins jurisdictions including Canada and the European Union in requiring streaming platforms to invest in local content. The Impact Analysis notes that Netflix has committed to €1 billion in Spain (2025-2028) and US$2.5 billion in Korea (2023-2027), amounts exceeding total reported SVOD investment in Australia since 2019.
Bottom line for screen workers: This legislation creates a guaranteed, enforceable floor of investment in new Australian content on streaming platforms for the first time. However, the real dollar impact is substantially less than the headline figures suggest once government offsets are factored in. The complete absence of AI provisions means the framework is already outdated and will require amendment to protect Australian creative workers as AI tools become more prevalent in production. The four-year review will be critical.