Europe is not America. That’s it, that’s the whole keynote I gave during the Copenhagen TV Festival.
If you’ve been reading Streaming Made Easy for a while, you’ve heard that tune from me before but here’s why it needs to be said over and over again. Almost every headline or strategy deck in this industry is still influenced by US numbers and trends. Those numbers and trends are real but they describe a market most of you don’t sell into.
So I gave the room the European picture instead. What our viewers actually do, what’s actually breaking and what I’d do about it. On the playbook itself, I ended my talk on a scorecard where I graded the US and Europe across 7 pillars: Local content & audience trust; Distribution / home screen; Advertising stack; Aggregation / bundling; Data & AI-readiness; Funding resilience; New formats, creators & fandom. Some scores sting. We have a lot of catch up to do but we nail the strongest pillar of all, the one that makes the rest moot. We just need to keep at it, relentlessly.
Now the full deck can be accessed in this edition but today I didn’t want to stop there. I spent half an hour telling a Danish audience that European markets deserve European analysis, it seemed only fair to do the work so the rest of this edition is all about Denmark with a bunch of cool charts.
Today at a glance:
The Danish living room never went mobile
Linear lost 3 points of Danish media time in a year
Denmark pays for streaming it doesn’t use enough
But Danes are loyal subscribers
What I’d do if I sold into Denmark
The Danish living room never went mobile
66% of Danes say they watch video on a TV set or projector every single day. In the US, that number is 41%. Turn it around and look at the phone: 81% in China, 61% in the US, 48% in Denmark. The EU15 average on the smartphone is 58%, so Denmark sits 10 points under even the European norm.
91% of Danes say they have a TV at home and 77% of those are smart TVs. Video projectors aren’t a thing in Denmark at 6% versus 26% in China.
Linear lost 3 points of Danish media time in a year
Nielsen and DR track how Danes split their total media time and Linear TV dropped 3 points year on year. Nothing else on the chart moved by more than 1 point and when it did, it was 1% of YoY growth, not decline.
Split it by age and you can see where those points went. This is becoming the typical chart we see in European markets with younger demos favouring on demand consumption and social media to Linear TV. What you don’t typically see however is increased viewership amongst the 25-31 year old demo.