By Nordvision secretariat
Nordic TV viewers are hooked on their neighbouring countries’ drama series, children’s programmes and lifestyle shows. The third season of The Bridge was broadcast almost simultaneously right across Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, gathering nearly 4 million Nordic viewers every week for ten weeks.
Never before have the Nordic public broadcasters shared as much of their respective programming, and the number of joint productions at the moment is the second highest ever. In total, in 2015 the Nordvision partnership hit a new record.
Nordvision is made up of the five Nordic countries’ public service television broadcasters. The increasingly collaboration and the great engagement in the Nordvision partnership
into can be explained by the international media development says Secretary-General of Nordvision, Henrik Hartmann:
“There is a lot of competition, not only from commercial broadcasters, but now also from new international players like Netflix and HBO Nordic. It is therefore advantageous to be able to cooperate on large and expensive drama and children’s drama productions – and hand-pick the best programmes from the Nordic TV stations and schedule them on their own channels”.
Nordvision is based upon the concept that the companies share what they own, and co-produce a vast number of different TV series. The cooperative generated a total of 4,850 programmes in 2015 alone, a number greater than ever before and an increase in over 20% on the total produced just two years previously.
At the same time, the number of news clips being shared between the Nordic countries’ newsrooms has also increased. The cooperation generated over 5,500 news clips in 2015.
Shared challenges might require shared solutions
However, the companies do not just share and co-produce drama series, news and children’s programmes. They are increasingly discussing strategic topics and jointly trying to solve the challenges they face. Marit af Björkesten, director at Swedish Yle, is the new chairperson for Nordvision since 1 January 2016. She says:
“Previously, many of the TV channels’ challenges and competitors were within their countries. Now, public service broadcasters across the Nordic countries face many of the same challenges. That is why it is sensible for us to learn from each other’s successes and mistakes, not least because it is a good way of spending licensing and tax revenues, and of further improving the quality of public service media throughout our countries.”
The Nordvision cooperative projects also include a number of Nordic workshops for the TV channels’ social media super user staff aimed at discussing new ways to produce and convey public service content on e.g. Facebook and Youtube. In addition, Nordic media researchers cooperatively collect data on media consumption among children, giving the TV channels better opportunities to tailor learning-based content for their youngest viewers.
The future of the Nordic cooperation
Henrik Hartmann believes that the Nordvision collaboration will continue to develop further:
“The fact that the collaboration has now spread to new areas says something about how strong the Nordic collaboration has become – but we ought to collaborate even more. We will, and we should, get better at collaborating on digital content.”
Marit af Björkesten confirms that the Nordvision partnership has been highly successful in recent years. She explains:
”At the moment, we are seeing how the sharing economy is becoming increasingly more common throughout society. In many ways, Nordvision has been ahead of its time due to the open, international manner in which the companies have been working on content and on concepts. Recent years have made it even clearer to us that the value of our products increases while being shared”.
For further information, please contact:
Henrik Hartmann, Secretary General
hrh@remove-this.dr.dk. / + 45 24 24 83 05
