Scandinavian dramas, popular on such U.S. streaming services as Netflix (The Valhalla Murders), HBO Max (The Investigation) and Trapped (Prime Video), to name a few, populate the recently launched (in the U.S.) subscription streaming service Viaplay. It’s only available here to Comcast Xfinity customers through X1, Flex and XClass TV devices for now. But plans are laid for a broader launch as a $4.99 monthly service here in the second half of 2022 or early 2023, Anders Jensen, CEO of Nordic Entertainment Group, told Next TV in a recent interview.
Jensen and chief content officer Filippa Wallestam are set to showcase two Viaplay originals, including “crime drama thriller” Partisan and “rom-com dramedy” Love Me (Jensen's descriptions) at the virtual Television Critics Association tour on February 2.
Partisan is “not sort of the Nordic noir that you would be used to. It's a little bit more artsy, I would say,” Jensen said. Love Me, set to be remade by Warner Bros., has helped pave a way for Nordic shows that are “more and more about, you know, life, with a fairly Nordic or Scandinavian twist to it,” he said.
The U.S. launch is the sixth country for Viaplay, and there are plans to bring at least six more countries on line in 2023. The U.S. is a crowded streaming market but a big and valuable one. Jensen is confident the content-packed Viaplay can achieve distribution goals on multiple platforms here as part of the 16-country rollout.
“We've done a lot of pre studies on how many households that have an affinity to potentially want to pay for and consume the kind of content that we represent,” Jensen said. “It's less than 10% of the 130 million households that there is in the U.S. But if we can connect with 5% of those 10%, it's enough for us to start to get a return on the content that we are investing in anyway. Then we can gradually ramp up and do more and more and grow in a clever way.” Doing the math, that looks like around 12 million households.
Comcast was a natural partner for a soft launch in the U.S, Jensen said, because NENT has worked with Comcast on aspects of Viaplay’s platform architecture. NENT could have tried a full U.S. launch right away, but it is also unleashing a larger, more expensive offering (including top live sports content) in The Netherlands, so it made sense to emerge here in a more contained way, he said.
Discussions are ongoing with other U.S. and Canadian distributors for the Viaplay app, Jensen said. For example: “Amazon is also a partner for other parts of our operations, so there is sort of a lot of interest from, particularly, Amazon. But that also spills over to discussions around Europe, so then it becomes a bigger discussion, not just through the U.S., then it's all of our territories and then it's a bigger discussion. So it takes a bit of time.”
'We're Quite Used to Dealing With That'
When it comes to big streaming platform Roku, which has posed the occasional difficulty for streaming services when it comes to agreement on terms, Jensen is confident, based on experience, that a deal can be reached for Viaplay.
“There's a lot of discussions with distributors and platform based businesses where there are sometimes, not so much conflicting interest but sort of different ambitions with what you want to achieve with the agreement. So we're quite used to dealing with that. And I anticipate that would be the case also in the U.S. with Roku and others. That there are some things you have to decide on: who controls the user experience, who holds the rights to the customer data, the billing relationship, all those things that need to be balanced so that both parties can gain from the relationship with the end user.”
Viaplay as of 2021 was available in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland before the Xfinity launch in the U.S. The Netherlands launch is slated for this March and the United Kingdom is on tap for later this year, followed by Canada, Germany, Austria and Switzerland by the end of 2023.
Viaplay content (more than 1,100 hours of content at launch) ranges beyond Nordic noir to dramas, documentary series and young adult content, the company said. The service offers a seven-day trial before the $4.99 monthly fee kicks in. ■
