The Nordic Entertainment (Nent) Group has announced a growth of 37,000 subscribers to its Viaplay service in the last quarter, and a 25-per-cent increase year-on-year.
Nent now has 1.459 million subscribers for Viaplay, which is currently available in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, broadcasting a range of premium sports content. The media group is set to launch in Iceland in 2020 completing the set of Nordic countries.
Nent will hope to build on this growth, having invested heavily in premium sports content over the last 18 months, including a summer spending spree in 2018 ahead of its listing on the Nasdaq Stockholm stock exchange earlier this year.
More recently it has turned its attention to popular winter sports in the region, including last week’s deal with the Infront agency for International Ice Hockey Federation rights.
Along with the IIHF it has prized several properties from public-service broadcasters in each market such as the International Skating Union events from 2019-20, as well as a package of Fédération Internationale de Ski (Fis) World Cup events from 2021-22, and the 2023 and 2025 Alpine and Nordic World Ski Championships.
Along with the launch in Iceland, Nent has also picked out yesterday’s announcement – that it reached an agreement with Norwegian telco Telenor Group to combine Viasat Consumer satellite pay-television operations with the latter’s Canal Digital service – as a reason to be positive for future growth.
President and chief executive of Nent, Anders Jensen, believes that a change in structure announced in September will help continue investment into content. He said: “We are moving from a country based model to a structure based on focused areas of responsibility working across markets, products and brands. The new structure will help us to take decisions faster, scale flexibly, and generate significant savings to enable our continuing investment into content and technology.”