Voddler, the video on demand service for movies and TV series, is now expanding outside of the nordics. Since launching in Sweden, Voddler has over the past two years gathered around 1.3 million registered users in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, and is now making Spain its fifth market.
The common pattern that Nordic startups seems to follow is to tackle the home market and then expand to the UK to start targeting the English speaking world. But with competitors including Netflix and Vdio also fighting over market share, it makes sense to target underserved markets. On this, Markus Bäcklund, Voddler’s CEO says, “Spain was an obvious choice for us as our first market outside of our home market of Scandinavia. It is a country of movie lovers, with good broadband penetration and an audience that is increasingly turning online.”
At launch, Voddler’s catalog in Spain consists of about 600 titles. The company says the catalog will now grow rapidly to reach the standard catalog size for Voddler, which is around 5 000 titles. Voddler has agreements with studios including Warner Bros., Disney, Universal, Sony Pictures and Paramount. Most current releases and most popular classics are offered as rentals, but a large part of the Voddler catalog is ad-funded and offered at no charge to the viewer. Voddler also offers offline functionality, so viewers can download Voddler movies and bring them wherever they’re going.
It also should be noted that at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, Nokia announced Voddler will be the exclusive entertainment partner for Nokia Lumia smartphones in Europe. The company already offers a mobile app on iPad, iPhone, Android, Symbian, Meego.
According to the press release, the app introduces a brand new concept: Voddler Lumia Movie Night. The functionality lets friends blend physical and online viewing by scheduling joint movie nights, using the mobile device not just for watching movies but also for “scheduling, organizing, chatting, reviewing and more.”
This partnership will likely lay a nice expansion framework for Voddler as Nokia pushes to get this content streaming app into all European countries.
