**4. Conclusions**

As many other PSM in Spain and Europe, EITB has had to adapt to platformization to face the competition of transnational streaming platforms and try to capture young audiences who don't consume linear television. This is not an easy challenge, given the magnitude of the VOD revenues and the rising number of subscribers in Europe, but also the declining audiences of public media. Between 2008 and 2022, regional public service media in Spain lost 35% of their audiences, and EITB lost 26% in the same period. Audiences of the Basque television reached an all-time low in 2014, with a share of 9.6%, almost half of the share in 2008 (17.9%) [49].

While the reasons for the audience loss are complex, the Basque public media corporation has decided to implement different multiplatform and distribution strategies to control the audience drain and keep up with the monopoly of transnational platforms. EITB's strategy has focused on a differential target (young audiences) and differential contents (about the Basque Country and preferably in the Basque language) in order to serve a niche that the main platforms don't cater to, and at the same time be committed to its public service mandate.

Platformization can enable PSM to fulfill their public mission in the digital age if it's formulated as a structural dimension with algorithms that ensure accessibility, plurality of opinions, content diversity, and equal opportunities for communication in the mutual relationship between the public media and their users on third-party platforms [28]. This remains to be seen, but a first regulatory step was taken by the European Union with the Audiovisual Media Services Directive in 2018. Accordingly, VOD service providers would contribute to the production of European works through a tax-based financial contribution for a fund geared to support independent audiovisual works [50].

The creation of the new OTT Primeran is at the heart of EITB's efforts to incorporate platformization in its new digital strategies, but the OTT needs to be fully developed to see its results. The social media and the new mobile apps started by EITB have had visible outcomes and the number of followers are on the rise, which could be explained by the new webseries, video podcasts and transmedia projects. Yet, digital audiences are difficult to measure, and the competition for viewers is a long-term struggle, despite a slight improvement of EITB's television audiences (particularly ETB2, mostly in Spanish) since 2021, from 10.8% to 13.1% of share.
