April 21, 2017

The Nordics lead the SVOD market in Europe

According to the recent data from Dataxis research, the Nordic region comprising Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland leads the SVOD market in Europe. According to the report, Nordic region represented 20 percent of all SVOD subscriptions in Europe in Q4 2016 and in the same quarter number of SVOD subscriptions in Nordic region were equivalent to the number of subscriptions in Germany and Italy.

The average revenue per user (ARPU) for each SVOD offer in Nordic is higher than in the rest of Europe. Dataxis estimates that the ARPU per offer in Nordic was around $10.6 in Q4 16 and this is explained by the fact that SVOD offers in Nordic cost relatively higher than in the rest of Europe.

For example, the standard offer of Netflix costs 89 DKK ($12.7) in Denmark versus 9.99 EUR ($10.7) in France. Consequently, there is a higher SVOD spending per person in Nordic than in the rest of Europe. According to Dataxis, the total customer spending on SVOD in Nordic reached almost 800M EUR ($848.2M) in 2016.

There are four main SVOD actors in the Nordics: Viaplay, HBO Nordic, C More and Netflix, with the later accounting for almost half of the market. ‍‍

Netflix: Launched in Q4 2012 in Nordic. With its early launch, Netflix has immediately dominated the Nordic SVOD market offering local and international content in the language of each country.
Viaplay: Launched in 2011, it’s the historical actor in Nordic. It expanded in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in July 2016.
HBO Nordic: Launched just after Netflix in Q3 2012. HBO offers SVOD only in Nordic but faced some constraints at the beginning to get subscribers because the offer was not aligned on Viaplay and Netflix: no free trial and 12 months’ mandatory commitment.
C More: C More, a pay TV actor, launched Filmnet in October 2012 in Sweden and in 2013 in Denmark, Finland and Norway. In 2015, Filmnet moved to C More website.An interesting move in term of monetization is the launch of SF Kids Play (an SVOD offer for kids) in Nordic in February 2016. SF Kids Play is the first SVOD offer of the giant TVOD actor in Nordic, SF Anytime (Bonnier AB Group). The launch of Amazon Prime Video in December 2016 in more than 200 countries including all the Nordic countries is going to intensify the competition and could change the top 4 in 2017.