The Basque Netflix created to attract young Basques in the consumption of content in Basque is already here. Primeran (which means "first") is already the first free platform promoted by the Basque Government through EiTB and with an offer that includes around 3,000 chapters. The main objective of the project led by Alex Gibelalde - an expert signed by public television after working for Twitter and in the audiobook sector - is to guarantee content in Basque for those under 30 years of age, Basque speakers who until now resort to platforms that They had Spanish and English as vehicular languages.
"If Basque is not incorporated into [digital] platforms, it will remain stagnant in audiovisual consumption," warned the general director of EiTB Andoni Aldekoa in May 2021. Journalist by profession, PNV activist and first advisor to the mayor of Bilbao Iñaki Azkuna and after Lehendakari Urkullu, Aldekoa arrived at EiTB with the mission of resituating an ossified entity. His appointment once again confirmed the control of the PNV over a public entity that was very sensitive to Basque nationalism. Aldekoa succeeded, among others, in the position Andoni Ortuzar, general director of the public corporation that combines television, radio and the internet for almost a decade (1990-2008).
Primeran, as they emphasized on Friday during their official presentation in the Tabakalera building in San Sebastián, joins a process of implementation of Basque that is carried out in the educational system, access to public service and in the media with mixed results. . A strategy of "linguistic normalization" in which nationalist parties such as PNV and EH Bildu use institutional control - including Basque radio and television - to extend the use of Basque, the language that, according to the latest report from the Basque Government, 680,000 citizens in Euskadi know. .
In the Basque Parliament, the two nationalist parties intend to approve a new Education Law that eliminates the possibility of training Basque schoolchildren in Spanish with the suppression of linguistic models and the Lehendakari Iñigo Urkullu announced a week ago a new Action Plan to the Promotion of Basque to accelerate the knowledge and use of Basque in a society to which some 5,000 foreign citizens join every three months.
However, as Aldekoa pointed out before the Basque Parliament 17 months ago, daily television consumption in Basque does not exceed 7,000 viewers, with an audience of 2% in 2022 according to data from the latest Barlovento report. Basque television has opted for secrecy and, for the moment, has not clarified how it will turn Primeran into a platform of interest for a society that is committed to Spanish in television consumption. In Euskadi, 74% of Basques watch television every day with preferences within the average of the rest of Spain. An example: the questioned Sálvame from Telecinco had its most loyal followers in Euskadi with an average audience in 2023 of 14.3% (12.6 in Spain as a whole).
The Basque Netflix bursts into a tense political climate in the Basque Country and in Spain as a whole with Basque, Catalan and Galician at the center of the demands of the Catalan and Basque sovereigntist parties to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.
In this context, Catalonia presented its own streaming platform last February. With the ambition of being a "repository of audiovisual matters of the main Catalan traditions", La these local televisions, mainly sports, cultural and traditional, such as events related to Castells.
To a lesser extent there is some training space, fictions such as the film Life without Sara Amat, and magazines that the user can recover through streaming. Its access is free upon registration and at the moment it has more than 2,000 on-demand audiovisual content.
This new platform depends on the Xarxa Audiovisual Local (XAL), the communication network of the Barcelona Provincial Council that brings together local stations, which aims to offer more local content adapting to new television consumption formats, such as the internet, but without forgetting the broadcast by DTT. Since its birth, it has been incorporating 10 contents on a weekly basis, mostly entertainment programs, such as the cultural Connecticat, along with multi-sport events from figure skating competitions, football, basketball, handball, among others, both professional and children's categories.
La of the platform.
