This past week has been crammed with news from all parts of the media industry, both on our home turf in the Nordics as well as from other parts of the world. While waiting for the markets’ Q3 reports, here is a brief summary of this week’s more significant news.

The podcast arena has been in the centre of attention all through 2021. This week, several Nordic actors have amped their game. In Norway, NRK presented several new titles to be added to their line-up this fall – for example a companion podcast to its recent success Maskorama, joining the trend of podcasts centred around a movie or series. Norwegian Aftenposten also presented new audio content for this fall, including Jeg var der, its first podcast to be put behind a paywall on PodMe. Aftenposten owner Schibsted recently acquired a 91% stake in this service. In Sweden, Bauer Media announced the launch of Podplay Live – a new format that will enable conversations between podcasters and listeners during a live broadcast. Älskade Psykopat (“Beloved Psychopath”) is the first title to explore this format. Further, recently launched service Sesamy, that offers audiobooks and e-books through per-item purchases, may soon be adding podcasts to their supply.

Consolidation on the Nordic publishing market continues. Last week, news broke that Danish JP/Politiken has acquired a 70% stake in the fifth largest publishing group in Norway – Kagge Forlag and J.M. Stenersens Forlag. Hence, expanding its Nordic footprint even further, following the launch of publishing house Polaris back in 2017. Meanwhile, Swedish actor Bonnier has withdrawn titles (including Expressen) from Readly in a move to focus on its own e-magazine service Arcy.

In terms of video, the upcoming Nordic launch of HBO Max has been in focus this week as the company communicated further details on the take-off – including that the monthly price will be significantly lower than the current price of HBO Nordic. Content will be produced in the Nordics under the brand Max Originals, including the Swedish comedy Lust with Sofia Helin. At Vox Media’s Code Conference earlier this week, WarnerMedia CEO said that the company will spend more than USD 18 billion on content across all areas of the business in both 2021 and 2022.

As such, the stream of heavy content investments continue – but a possible strike in Hollywood raise worries over potential production delays. 60,000 of Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes workers, including camera operators, script coordinators, and makeup artists, voted to authorize an industry-wide strike on Monday. The union has been advocating for better working hours, safer workplace conditions and improved benefits. Among the demands are higher compensation from streaming services. An agreement made in 2009 allowed streaming services with fewer than 20 million subscribers to pay workers lower-than-standard wages. The intention was to help streaming become more popular, but as it has persisted to this day when streaming holds a significantly different position in the industry, workers call for the agreement to be retracted.

Lastly, we have seen several successful theatrical releases these past couple of weeks as international box office has returned post-pandemic – also in the Nordics. The latest tent-pole title to premiere was MGM/Eon/Universal’s No Time to Die, the final Bond-movie with Daniel Craig in the leading role, which hit USD 121 million in international box office during its opening weekend. These figures are in line with Skyfall, and just below Spectre (-15%).

These are the topics we focus on in this week’s newsletter:

• Swedish households’ appetite for audiobook streaming subscriptions surged in 2021
• BritBox to expand across Nordics via C More partnership