Kristine Lowe

SVT hopes live online broadcasts will force PC-owners to pay license fee

Sweden's public broadcaster (SVT) is about to start making all its programmes available in real-time online, a project it is hoped will result in a massive increase in license fee payers.

Eva Hamilton, the head of Sweden's public broadcaster (SVT), told Sweden's Radio (SR) the logical consequence of SVT making all its content available online should be that the license fee no longer would be tied up to whether or not a household had a TV, but be extended to all PC-owners. Danish politicians have recently discussed similar measures to ease the financial woes of the country's public broadcaster.

Frozen Pizza with Champagne and the World's laziest Anarchy

How do you attract the biggest possible audience online?

Schibsted-owned VG's recipe is to give people the diet they had no idea they craved. Norway's public broadcaster, NRK, wants to make it easier for lazy users to take shortcuts.

I forgot to link up this piece I wrote a while back on these two different strategies for gaining the biggest possible online audience. I think comparing these strategies is interesting for two reasons:

1) Vg.no is Norway's most read news site while Nrk.no was one of, if not the, fastest riser(s) on TNS Gallup's list of the country's top ten most used websites last year (five of which currently are news sites).

2) To my mind, these strategies represent two very different takes on serendipity, and it will be interesting to see which of these will be more successful in the long run - as more and more people spend more and more time on the web.

The article is based on this debate, and this blog post's headline is the headline none of my editors, perhaps for obvious reasons, would allow me to use (admittedly, I ditched it myself for the piece I'm linking up here).

NB: I'm using PublicBroadcasting as a tag for the first time on this post. It's far from the first time I've written on public broadcasting, but I've got a huge job to do in terms of re-tagging my posts to make the tags more accurate and consistent (never inteded to write about media when I started this blog in 2005 you see, so need to tidy up those tags on a day I've got aons of time to spend)