OTT has one third of total TV subscriptions in Nordics

OTT streamers now represent a third of the total pay-TV subscriptions in the Nordics, against less than 18% in the rest of Western Europe.

In the Nordics, the pay-TV landscape has changed considerably since the introduction of OTT services, reports Dataxis. The region was a testbed for some of the most popular streaming services when they first addressed the European market, with Netflix adoption of streaming services and its impact on content viewing consumption giving a digital makeover to the local TV distribution industry.
The region historically counted as one of the most developed pay TV markets in Europe, with virtually every household subscribing to a paying TV service, and an average monthly revenue per household of €25 in 2015.But a growing number of households in the region have been pulling the plug on their traditional TV plans in favour of standalone OTT platforms says Dataxis, driving historical TV operators into diversifying their service portfolio and introducing more flexibility in their bundles in order to retain customers. Due to their role as forerunners of the streaming market in Europe, the Nordics are among the countries where the largest number of OTT services are available.
Nordic telcos became the privileged interlocutors for any new service that wishes to enter the market, as Paramount+ in 2021 when it decided to launch its service in the region only through partnerships with local distributors. Britbox, the UK-born platform focusing on British content, also launched in the Nordics in the first half of this year and chose local pure players C More (in Sweden, Denmark and Finland) and TV2 Sumo (in Norway) as its partner.
In Finland, the leading paid OTT services, Viaplay and Elisa Entertainment, operated by local telco and content producer Elisa, have merged their portfolio into one bundled subscription at the end of last year.