There’s never really a bad time to go to Copenhagen and now established in the TV calendar at the end of September, the Nordic TV Summit provides another reason to visit the city. Joseph O’Halloran took the trip on your behalf.
If you had to pick two companies that respectively defined the video industry at the turn of the millennium and currently, it would not be much of a surprise if you chose Blockbuster and Netflix. Both started out distributing DVDs and subsequently had grand designs to offer content on-demand over fast broadband networks. Netflix’s plentiful success in doing so is probably as marked as Blockbuster’s lack of and subsequent corporate collapse. But there is right now a place where both companies are co-existing as upstart arrivals to a rich market: the Nordic region. And as exemplified by the 2017 edition of the Nordic TV Summit, they stand poised to prosper in a region that has passed a tipping point in terms of how people receive and consume content.The key driver in the market, and the show’s underlying theme, was just how over-the-top services are superseding and supplanting traditional TV in countries that benefit from relatively high disposable incomes and markedly robust networks, whether wired or wireless. According to Marie Nilsson, CEO of Stockholm-based independent analysis and consultancy firm Mediavision, the Nordic area was providing a fertile ground for TV suppliers, being worth around €7 billion, with the traditional market amounting to just under half the total value at €3.1 billion, and with SVOD services growing 62% year-on-year. Read more and download this month's free issue >>

Northern lights

Archive