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Viaplay in the storm: Scandi platform launches in the UK despite high cost of expansion

28 October 2022
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The Nordic streamer arrives in the UK on 1 November with two ad-free tiers: a basic £3.99 per month service featuring (mostly) Nordic scripted content, and a £14.99 version including sports, thanks to recently acquired Premier Sports.

Viaplay’s UK economics will revolve around sports: it has to demonstrate that there is room for a new premium service in the market. Substantial marketing efforts and distribution deals with the likes of Sky and Amazon will be critical to build penetration.

The UK is the latest territory in an ongoing aggressive international deployment that has driven Viaplay into loss. It aims at multi-territory economies of scale, which work for scripted content, but appear illusory for sports.

 

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  • Nordic Entertainment Group: Spinning out of the Nordics

    4 April 2022

    Digital pioneer Viaplay has been leading NENT’s exemplary transition from linear to on-demand with sustained revenue and subscriber growth—unlike its pay-TV peers

    These results have been leveraged to tell capital markets a Netflix-like equity story, underpinning ambitious growth targets to 2025 for the Nordics and new launches abroad, including the UK this year (albeit in low-key mode)

    Expansion builds on a pivot to fixed costs originals and multi-territory sports rights. But, in highly competitive markets, we are sceptical of NENT’s capacity to generate the revenues necessary to breakeven with fast rising content costs

    Access report