The company, which is one of Sweden’s largest local media groups consisting of 19 titles, launched several TV stations across the country in 2008.

See also: This article was originally published as part of a longer dual case study. The full article, in its original form, can be found here.

The goal was to produce “old-school-style traditional TV, with the big cameras, and trying to compete with public service and commercial TV stations,” said Jens Pettersson, Head of Editorial Development at NTM, during WAN-IFRA’s recent Digital Media Europe conference in Vienna.

“We were aiming for the people who were sitting on the sofas and watching TV in an old-fashioned way,” he said.

Pettersson said that the company tried to make this strategy work for over 10 years, and ended up investing over 35 million euros in this approach – before changing their video strategy altogether.

“I must admit that this was quite an expensive lesson to learn. But it was important for us to do this, because we learned a lot of things from it,” he said.

Learnings that shaped NTM’s current video strategy

Their initial video strategy had three main issues, Pettersson said. First, they couldn’t get enough audience data.

“We couldn’t tell the newsrooms, the reporters, and the editors what kind of video content is actually resonating with the audience. They had no idea. It’s like they were driving the car blind,” he said.

Second, and related to lack of data, monetisation was difficult because the company couldn’t share with advertisers enough information about the size and type of viewership that was watching their programmes.

But the biggest issue was that customer behaviour was moving away from traditional TV watching habits, and this change was happening faster than NTM realised.

“We were not supposed to be doing TV for people sitting on the sofa. That’s not a good idea. We should have realised that way faster than we did,” Pettersson said.

Video now ‘everyone’s responsibility’

Jump forward to today, and the company’s current approach to video seems like a complete U-turn from the earlier, centralised model.

Today, the entire company is focused on digital subscriptions, and their overall strategy is geared towards “creating really valuable content for our paying subscribers,” he said.

Video has an important part in this: “For me, video is part of the storytelling of what’s going on in your city,” he said. “It’s an essential part of the value offering to the subscribers.“

Although video also drives advertising revenue from display ads on websites and pre-rolls on video, “our main concern is to actually make our subscribers happy,” he said.

Having abandoned the “TV studio” approach, the company has adopted a more spread-out strategy for its video production.

“For us, it’s crystal clear that every reporter should be able to bring home a story in text, in pictures, and in video. And the video is supposed to be for our websites and apps and for social media,” Pettersson said.

“It’s not a concern for just a small part of the newsroom. It’s everyone’s responsibility,“ he said.

NTM’s journalists working on the ground are encouraged to use video when the story is best told by video, such as interviews with a “human touch,” he said.

“Also, when it comes to festivals or other happenings in the city, video is for us one way of bringing people along with what is going on,” he said.

Investing in live sports

Video footage coming from a journalist’s smartphone might of course be of limited quality in a technical sense. Pettersson, however, believes that authenticity is more important than quality.

The key is to focus on “capturing the essence of the news itself: ‘This happened here. We have it on video. Boom!’” he said.

“For us, the insight was that it’s not really quality that drives watching. It is the authenticity, if you actually capture the moment of the news. Then it can be quite a crappy video but loved by the customers,” he added.

One specific area where NTM has invested heavily is live sports video, as the company has during the past few years bought the broadcasting rights for local football divisions (below the top tier), as well as for the highest floorball divisions, for both men and women.

Live sports forms a significant part of NTM’s video output: in 2022, it broadcasted 869 sports events live.

“We have consolidated our status as the natural place to go for viewing local live sports,” Pettersson said.

“It’s really good for us. It brings us loyal customers, and they have a higher customer lifetime value. They hold on to us for a longer time and they pay us more since they pay for a premium package,” he said.

Most matches are shot by one person from the location, while commentators broadcast live from the newsroom studio. NTM has also experimented with AI cameras for capturing the matches, but the quality has been lacking so far.

“But the technology is evolving so fast,” Pettersson said. “I think in just one year, we are going to broadcast 20-30% of our matches using AI technology.”