”The novelty and perception of the Chinese market have on the Nordic countries is very positive,” explained Elisa TV director, head of binge business Einari Kanerva. He told IBC365: “We are taking advantage of that.”
Elisa TV has expanded its content production business beyond the Nordic region and has been driven by the desire to tap into a densly populated market beyond the saturdated Nordic region.
Kanerva said: “We do high quality TV productions in all of the countries which is different from what the local market offers.
”The Elisa originals are important for us both for domestic and Chinese markets and we have started it gradually, this year there are seven series, which we started smaller and have grown gradually.”
He explained the co-production partnerships: ”Gives us exclusive content, tailored to our customers needs and interests.”
Elisa is a Finnish telecommunications company now serving over 2.8 million customers in Finland, Estonia and internationally.
Success outside Scandinavia
”Elisa TV is growing up and adding new territories, users and viewers all the time and we are also increasing in penetration,” he added.
After conducting market studies regionally, it pointed to the current players in China not satisfying the consumers demand for high quality European content.
He explained the viewership data helped to drive its business strategy to commission and produce content.
The priority for Kanerva over the next 12 months is to expand the Elisa roll out across China, “to ensure that we get nation wide coverage.”
He added: ”Our next step in the roll out is to double the number of regions and provinces we are present in and then to open up some new distribution partners.”
Kanerva called for partners to collaborate and co-produce content to share between the Nordics and Chinese markets.
He added: “We need to understand how to educate and inform consumers in the right way about the Nordic TV catalogue.”
However the localisation challenges with multiple languages in one video have been improved with automatic translation seeing between 30 and 40% success.
“We are open to partnering and are looking for new partners in this space to broaden our customer based and collaborate with OTT providers.”
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