European Commission’s Abbamonte slams 30% cut to AgoraEU fund

MIA 2026 gets under way in Rome

MIA: The European Commission’s director of media policy Giuseppe Abbamonte has condemned a proposed 30% cut to the €8.6bn (US$9.6bn) AgoraEU culture and media programme as disproportionate.

Giuseppe Abbamonte

A draft budget proposal published on October 10 by the Irish presidency of the council of the EU outlined an 8% reduction to the overall EU budget. It singles out AgoraEU, the EU’s future funding package for culture, media, civil society and democracy, for a far larger cut.

“AgoraEU would be hit by a cut almost four times higher than the average,” said Abbamonte, director of media policy at DG Connect, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.

Abbamonte was speaking at the Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo conference in Rome, which opened today with the launch of the European Investment Hub. He welcomed the hub as “music to our ears” and “an initiative of great strategic importance that arrives at the right moment.”

He set the initiative against a competitiveness crisis in the European audiovisual sector. US companies have increased their share of the EU market by nine percentage points since 2016, while European firms have lost eight points. Three US streaming platforms now dominate the European market, he said, and non-European video-sharing platforms command almost as much viewing time as all subscription services combined.

“YouTube is the main European streaming service,” Abbamonte said.

Gaming presents equally troubling figures, he added. Europe punches above its weight in terms of creators and high-level development studios, but the EU captures only about 16% of global revenues, with “game engines, platforms, app stores owned for the most part by companies outside our continent.”

Abbamonte said global competition now hinges on “who owns the intellectual property rights, who controls distribution and data, and who has the financial resources necessary to carry out ambitious projects capable of reaching audiences beyond national borders.”

He said the Commission’s strategic response had shifted from decades of asking “how much public funding can we obtain” to ensuring European companies “attract private capital, capable of growing and maintaining control of intellectual property.” This required investment in companies, not only in individual projects, keeping IP in Europe and promoting co-operation between the public and private sectors, he said.

The InvestEU programme exemplifies this approach. It is designed to mobilise private and public investment for Europe’s key policy priorities, such as the green and digital transitions, innovation, sustainable infrastructure, and small and medium-sized enterprises.

The EU budget guarantees part of the loans that banks grant, which reduces their risk and opens up financing creative businesses could not otherwise get. In Italy alone, banks had lent more than €460m to nearly 3,200 creative enterprises under the scheme by mid-2026, with an average loan of around €145,000, Abbamonte said.

MediaInvest, an equity investment tool launched by the Commission and managed by the EIF, has completed more than 60 investments totalling over €90m. It aims to mobilise €400m by the end of 2027.

AgoraEU is designed to expand support for cross-border content, marketing, distribution and gaming innovation, said Abbamonte. It would operate alongside the €409bn European Competitiveness Fund, which includes €51.5bn for digital leadership and would house InvestEU.

“The negotiations are not yet concluded,” Abbamonte told industry representatives in Rome. “The Commission will continue to defend its proposal and we can certainly count on your support expressed vigorously and unequivocally.” Supporting European content, he said, is about “investing in our competitiveness but also in the resilience of our democracies.”