Spain’s Screen Industry: Netflix’s €1bn Hub and Mediapro’s Fall

“Money Heist” was cancelled by a Spanish broadcaster after two seasons and became the most-watched non-English series in Netflix’s history, and that single reversal explains most of what has happened to Spain’s screen industry since. Global streamers discovered that Spanish producers could make content the world would watch, at a cost far below Los Angeles, in a language that opens Latin America. This article follows the money: Netflix’s hub, Mediapro’s fall, the broadcasters, the tax rules and the export business. It is part of the Spain Company Stories hub.

Why did Netflix build its European hub in Spain?

Because Spanish content worked before Spain was cheap. Netflix launched in Spain in October 2015 and within two years its Spanish originals — first “Las chicas del cable”, then “La casa de papel” after it acquired the Antena 3 series in 2017 — were outperforming most of its English-language slate. The hub decision followed the data.

The site is at Madrid Content City in Tres Cantos, a studio complex developed by Spanish group Secuoya. Netflix opened its first European production hub there in April 2019 and has expanded it to 22,000 m² across ten sound stages, offices and a post-production centre, which the company describes as the largest filming area in the EU. It was the first hub Netflix built outside the United States.

The scale of output is unusual. Netflix says it has released more than 1,000 Spanish productions since 2017, filmed in over 200 locations, supported over 20,000 jobs and worked with more than 40 local production companies. In 2024 alone Spanish titles generated over 5 billion hours of viewing worldwide.

In June 2025, marking ten years in Spain, co-CEO Ted Sarandos announced in Madrid that Netflix would invest more than €1bn in Spanish production between 2025 and 2028. That is, by some distance, the largest commitment any streamer has made to a single European country outside the UK, and it came with a promise of more films, more unscripted and further studio expansion.

What made “Money Heist” and “Élite” an export business?

They proved that a Spanish series with a Spanish cast, in Spanish, could be a global first-run product rather than a format to be remade. “La casa de papel”, produced by Vancouver Media for Antena 3, was a modest domestic hit that Atresmedia ended after two parts. Netflix bought the global rights, recut it, and by 2018 it was the most-watched non-English series on the platform, a position it held for years until “Squid Game”.

The economics changed at that moment. Netflix commissioned three further parts directly, at budgets several times the original, plus the 2023 spin-off “Berlin” and a Korean remake. The cast — Úrsula Corberó, Álvaro Morte, Pedro Alonso — became international names, which raised the price of Spanish talent and the attractiveness of Spanish stories.

“Élite”, launched in 2018 and produced by Zeta Studios, ran for eight seasons to 2024 and is Netflix’s longest-running original anywhere. Films followed: “La sociedad de la nieve” (Society of the Snow) won 12 Goyas and two Oscar nominations in 2024. The pattern is consistent: mid-budget, high-craft, made in Madrid or the Canaries, sold to 190 countries on day one.

The lesson for the industry was that export no longer meant selling formats to broadcasters, as Globomedia and Boomerang had done for “Los Serrano” or “El internado”. It meant producing for a platform that paid a premium, owned everything, and put the show in front of a global audience simultaneously. That shifted power from broadcasters to producers, and from producers to streamers.

What happened to Mediapro?

The dominant Spanish audiovisual group of the 2010s lost its founders, its biggest contract and hundreds of millions of euros in the space of three years. Mediapro reported a loss of €286m for 2025, its largest ever, cut 189 jobs or about 19% of its workforce, and has accumulated losses of more than €1bn since 2018, when revenue peaked at roughly €1.97bn.

Ownership passed to China in stages. Orient Hontai Capital bought a majority in 2018 in a deal valuing the group at around €1.9bn; founders Jaume Roures and Tatxo Benet kept minority stakes and management control. That ended in 2024, when Orient Hontai’s vehicle Southwind took absolute control — about 85% — and Roures, Benet and Gerard Romy exited entirely. Sergio Oslé, formerly head of Movistar Plus+, became president; Carlos Núñez, ex-Prisa, chief executive.

The commercial blow came in April 2025. LaLiga awarded the production of its matches from 2025-26 to HBS and NVP Sports, ending a relationship that had defined Mediapro for over a decade and removing revenue estimated at around €400m over five years. Mediapro had also lost its role as the intermediary that bought and resold LaLiga rights — the business on which the group was built, and which is analysed in our article on LaLiga’s rights model.

The balance sheet was restructured in late 2024: about €525m of debt refinanced, maturity pushed from 2027 to 2029 and the rate cut from 7.5% to 5.75%. In 2026 the group has been seeking a second chance with government, banks and LaLiga, repositioning as a production and technical-services company. It still produces films through The Mediapro Studio and has strong operations in Latin America, but the era in which it sat between the league and the broadcasters is over.

How do Atresmedia and Mediaset España make money now?

From television advertising that is shrinking slowly, and from producing for the streamers that are shrinking it. Atresmedia, owner of Antena 3 and laSexta and controlled by the Planeta group with Bertelsmann’s RTL as a large minority holder, reported net revenue of €696.5m and net profit of €63.5m for the first nine months of 2025, with a 25.7% audience share that has made Antena 3 Spain’s most-watched channel for several years.

Mediaset España, owner of Telecinco and Cuatro, was delisted from the Madrid exchange in 2023 and folded into MFE-MediaForEurope, the Berlusconi family’s pan-European holding. It has lost audience leadership to Atresmedia and cut costs; its role within MFE is as the Spanish arm of a group whose strategy is continental scale in advertising sales.

Both groups earn a growing share from production. Atresmedia’s Buendia Estudios, a joint venture with Telefónica, and Mediaset’s Mediterráneo produce series for Netflix, Prime Video and Movistar Plus+ as well as for their own channels. Atresmedia’s non-advertising revenue grew nearly 10% year on year in 2025. The broadcaster that cancelled “La casa de papel” now sells shows to the company that made it famous.

The structural problem is the advertising pool. Spanish TV advertising is worth roughly €1.7–1.8bn a year and has been flat to declining for a decade in real terms, while digital advertising has grown past it. The two groups still take the large majority of TV spend between them; the question is how long TV spend remains large enough to matter.

What do the tax incentives and the Audiovisual Hub plan do?

They cut the cost of shooting in Spain by a quarter to a half. Mainland Spain offers a corporate tax deduction of 30% on the first €1m of eligible spend and 25% above it, per production, with a cap that the 2023 reform raised to the tens of millions. The Canary Islands, under their special economic regime, offer 54% and 45%, which is why “Money Heist”, “Wonder Woman 1984” and dozens of streaming series have shot there. Navarre and the Basque Country offer up to 40% and 60% respectively.

The Spain Audiovisual Hub plan, approved in March 2021 as part of the post-pandemic recovery programme, committed €1.6bn of public money through 2025 to studios, training, digitalisation and international promotion, with the stated aim of raising audiovisual output by 30%. The related Startup Law and visa reforms for foreign crews came alongside it.

The results are visible in the numbers Invest in Spain publishes: about 72,000 professionals in 6,700 companies, sixth in the EU for titles produced, fifth for production hours. PwC estimated the fiction-series market alone at close to €4.3bn of revenue supporting some 18,000 jobs. Studio capacity has grown in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Tenerife, much of it built for streaming clients.

The incentive competition is real. The UK, Hungary and, increasingly, Italy and Portugal offer comparable or better headline rates. Spain’s advantage is the combination: a large domestic industry that provides crews and cast, a language market, and streamers that have already sunk capital into Madrid. The same combination of incentives and installed base explains other Spanish success stories, such as the Barcelona and Madrid startup ecosystems.

Where does Movistar Plus+ fit?

It is Spain’s largest pay-TV platform and its most important domestic commissioner of premium series. Telefónica’s Movistar Plus+ has around 4 million direct subscribers, carries half of LaLiga and most of the Champions League, and since 2016 has produced original series — “La peste”, “Antidisturbios”, “La Mesías” — that have won more Spanish critics’ awards than any streamer’s.

Its business changed in 2024 when Telefónica opened the platform to customers of rival operators, turning a bundled retention tool into a standalone streaming service, and again in November 2025 when it and DAZN renewed LaLiga rights to 2032 at around €1.05bn a season between them. The cost of football dominates its budget; original series are a fraction of that.

Movistar Plus+ matters to the production ecosystem because it is the only Spanish-owned buyer that pays streaming-level budgets, through Buendia Estudios and independent producers. Its parent’s wider restructuring is examined in our profile of Telefónica under Marc Murtra; the platform’s future depends on whether a company shrinking its footprint keeps funding Spanish drama at a loss.

Why is the Spanish language the industry’s biggest asset?

Because it turns a domestic production into a product with a 600-million-person primary market. Spanish is the native language of around 500 million people across Spain, 19 Latin American countries and a US Hispanic population of over 60 million; Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Max all treat Spanish-language originals as a single category with two production centres, Madrid and Mexico City.

Spain wins a disproportionate share of that spend. Its crews are unionised but cheaper than Mexico’s top tier for high-end drama, its incentives are more predictable, and its producers have two decades of series-format experience from the broadcaster era. Series shot in Madrid with Latin American casts — and Mexican or Colombian productions post-produced in Spain — are routine.

The corporate consequence is that Spanish groups have become Latin American groups. Mediapro’s remaining strength is in Argentina, Mexico and Colombia; Atresmedia distributes Antena 3 content across the region; Secuoya operates studios in Colombia. The model resembles what Spanish banks and telecoms did in the 1990s, described in our piece on Santander’s global expansion: use a shared language to build scale that the home market alone could never support.

The risk is symmetrical. If US streamers decide that Mexico City, with lower costs and a bigger population, should be the primary Spanish-language hub, Madrid loses its premium. Netflix’s €1bn pledge suggests it has not decided that yet.

Frequently Asked Questions