Warm welcome to all of you here today. Thank you very much for taking time out of your very busy schedules to come here and listen to what we have to say today. I'm super excited about standing here before you today, talking about the strategy for Nordic Entertainment Group, the journey we're on, the journey we have been on, and also talk a little bit about the journeys that we don't want to go on, where we think we should stay, where we should play, and where we should not. I will spend quite a lot of time talking about the company that we're building, not just all the hardcore numbers and the financial opportunities and the product opportunities. I also want to share with you what kind of company Nordic Entertainment Group strive to be in the future, to be sustainable, to be present for a long time.
That is a very key component on everything that you are doing as a business, and for us, it's very important. This journey started some years ago when we discussed how we should develop MTG into the future. We had, at that time, started to invest in new verticals, in e-sports and in gaming, and in multi-platform networks, and we were thinking about how to develop our core Nordic assets going forward. It was also quite clear at the time that the international ventures in Africa, in Central Eastern Europe, in Russia, et cetera, they were probably not part of our future. That was a divestment journey that we embarked on. Those proceeds we used to buy new businesses in the MTGx vertical, to pay dividends, and to invest in our Nordic business.
It allowed us to invest ahead of the curve in our Nordic business, alongside the investments in buying new companies in MTGx. We decided that we're probably in a position where we're better off as two companies, and that's why we're here today. We took a small detour through a merger that came and went, very quickly after that, we landed here. The ambition from the beginning was not just to merge with somebody, but to create a new standalone company. The TDC merger that didn't happen was an opportunity and a very unique, isolated opportunity. It didn't happen, thus it constitutes a missed opportunity, but nonetheless, just an opportunity. The biggest opportunity of them all is the one that we want to discuss with you here today.
I'm going to be very open, as open as I possibly can, answer as many questions as you possibly may have. Please don't refrain from asking them. What I will cover today, as I said, I will talk a bit about the company we are and the company we want to be, our purpose, our values, the choices we have made, the choices we have ahead of us. I will talk, no surprise, a lot about streaming and the opportunity surrounding streaming services in general, and obviously Viaplay in particular. The most relevant entertainment and content experiences you will hear a lot later from Jakob. We are in a very strong position when it comes to content, and today we're trying to really explain what that means, because it may be a bit ambiguous if you're not into the details. You buy a lot of content.
What exactly does that mean? That we will talk about today. Talk about the team, obviously. We would be nowhere without the fantastic team that we have and have developed over so many years. The business model that is actually quite unique. When I sum this up and we think about who we are and where we want to be and who should we compare ourselves with, one of the things that I really want to establish today is the fact that we have no evident peer out there. There is no analog for NENT Group in Europe today, actually, which is both an opportunity and a challenge, of course. It is always easier to have something to compare with, but we are creating a new kind of company, a new kind of vehicle in the entertainment media landscape.
We are not like these others, we are not really like these others. We are actually creating a category of our own. This you know, this is the reason why everything is up in the air, so to speak. The TV landscape, it is changing. It has been changing for some time. This is not new. It has happened over the past five, six, seven years. It is driven almost as always when it comes to innovation by technology. Technology in the devices that we all use on an almost daily or even hourly basis, technology with broadband in the ground and in the air that can support the services that we want to consume, and then disruption. Services coming in from the side, surprising the incumbents in the market.
I have spent more than 20 years in the telco industry. I think you cannot ask any telecom executive who is truthful saying, "Did you see the iPhone coming?" The answer is obviously no. Most media executive, "Did you see Netflix coming?" Most would say no. We would say yes, then we would be sort of truthful because we launched Viasat On Demand, which was the first of its kind video-on-demand service in 2007, when Netflix was still shipping DVDs back and forth. Obviously, as in big changes and disruption, it need to be big and it need to be global. Obviously, Viasat On Demand, good as it was at the time, was not a global service. Netflix changed all of that and the industry, oh, what happened?
I joined MTG back in 2014. When I talked to my colleagues in the industry, it was like it was doomsday. Oh, the TV is dead. TV is going down. People are not consuming it. It was the industry that declared TV dead, not the advertisers, because they continued to buy advertising. Not the consumers, because we like to consume video, as I will show you. It was the industry itself. We discussed and we said, "This cannot be. This has to be an opportunity." We are not incumbents standing still accepting seeing our fantastic business that we started in 1987 going down the drain with music. That is not us. We started an internal transformation journey in Nordic Entertainment alongside the MTGx journey that has now resulted in two very separate, very strong, very interesting companies. That is the journey that we want to describe today.
The consumer today has all the power. There is no future for 24-month commitment periods and you have to pay for your set-top box and these kind of approaches. They are a thing of the past. They're still around. Some of us still pay and we're happy with it, fairly high bills for those kind of services, but they're not the future, I think we can all agree on. Something else is and the consumer decides. We buy a service. We get a free month. If we don't like that free month, we churn. The company who offered you the service have made nothing on you as a consumer. That's the reality. Whether you're a video-on-demand service or whether you actually provide telecommunication, binding periods, commitment periods, tricky contracts is no more. We have to excel with the quality of our services.
That is what has to deliver everything to the consumer because the consumer has the power. Right around the corner we have 5G. 5G, is that not just an upgrade into higher speeds? Is that a non-event? No, it's not a non-event. It's the next ladder on real quality, real high-quality broadband in the air. Not only does it deliver increased speeds, it addresses the issue with latency and the networks, which for video is a very specific problem. If we think we're seeing a revolution of consumption of video now, it has only just begun. All of us, being the consumers in the middle, we are driving it. This goes to show that TV is by no means dead. TV is often defined by the device we consume it on, which of course is wrong.
When my oldest son, he is studying abroad, when he is home, he is not out in the garden helping a lot. He's not washing up the dishes. He sits in front of the TV. He's very digital and he thinks he's very suave and I said, "Oliver, do you watch TV?" He said, "I never watch TV." His definition is not the device that he's consuming it on. He's consuming a lot of stuff, but it's all on-demand services on a TV. For the new generation, doesn't matter whether it's on this device or that device or that device. What is dead is linear scheduled TV. That is not the future unless it's live. That is changing, which means that there is actually a future also for linear, but it's going to look different.
The youth and the consumers of tomorrow, they will watch a lot of TV. They just don't define it as we do by the machine. As you can see here, the mobile devices are the ones claiming more and more of this growth. That is no surprise. I would argue that that will continue and maybe escalate even further. Then a little bit further down the line, we'll probably see a trend shift again, giving more focus to the bigger screens and the bigger devices. Video is growing. We are by all means across all platforms and since we have radio, I have to include audio, they are all growing. Audio is growing and video is growing. That's the starting point. Very important.
When we look at ourselves as a company with our roughly 2,000 employees in many countries, we have to be united around what it is that we do. A company needs to have a purpose above and beyond making money. That's the result. What is our purpose? We worked quite extensively with all of our employees on that and we landed in this. This is what NENT Group is. This is what we do. This is what we want to do more of. We tell stories. Those stories touch many millions of lives every day. People are opinionated. They laugh, they cry, they turn off, they turn on. They have a view of the content that we create. That is what we want to do and do more of.
We want to expand mindsets and by doing so, we will be expanding worlds and tear down both emotional and physical and all sorts of barriers that we might encompass in our lives. This is what we do. We translate that into all the business things that you will hear during the day. You see a very powerful proposition. We take the most highly rated commodity of all and turn into business: emotions. If you get an emotional connection, you have a very strong starting point. That's our purpose. Values define who we are as a company, what we do, and what we do not do. I think you all agree that that's important in any company, is more relevant than ever in this day and age. Same as with the purpose, we asked all of our employees what they think is important.
We've had workshops, we've had various ways of getting input from the employees to land in four values that we all can stand behind. Bravery, equality, appreciation, and trust. Bravery because we are who we are. Make no mistake, we have not forgotten where we come from. From Jan Stenbeck's heritage, what he created when he started everything back in 1987, challenge what need to be challenged and get opportunities out of it. That challenger DNA, even if we have changed a lot over the years as a company, that is part of our DNA, because that's who we want to be. We want to challenge what need to be challenged. We want to be equal. Equal opportunities for all, indifferent of gender, indifferent of social background, language, sexual preferences, whether you have a disability, there have to be ways for us to invite everybody to our business.
This is important not just because it's the right thing to have as a value, because if you fail to deliver this, you will not attract the talent you need in any given business, and definitely not in our business. The old way of being a media company, and you have seen how Hollywood giants have crumbled to the ground based on totally unacceptable behavior. We just have to set things right. This means where we say yes and where we say no, that we do not do. Everybody's welcome that can contribute to the journey of Nordic Entertainment Group. We appreciate and we trust the team. I have a very sort of distinct wish to push down decisions as much as possible in the organization, because it increases speed. Speed means more opportunities in every given industry and definitely in our industry. We cannot be top-down.
We have to make sure that people can make decisions and move on. That means we have to trust people because we have to give out a lot of information, because uninformed people don't make good decisions. We have to have, obviously, the right people in the right place, and we have to show them appreciation. Once we get the right people on board, and if they don't feel that we recognize them, they will leave. This is certainly true for the young professionals coming out of the universities as we speak. Feeling appreciated when you go to work is one of the things that rate is highest. Big company failing to deliver on that will fail. We're entertainment and we're tech. I'll come back to that. In both those categories, this holds very true. Bravery, equality, appreciation, trust. Beat.
We think we are the heartbeat of entertainment. This is something that we own, all of us in Nordic Entertainment Group. It forms a very powerful proposition for us to move this company forward. I want to show you a short video because you see my very sort of subtle entrance here with the Champions League hymn and the trip here and everything. It's not low-key. Our industry is typically not low-key when we talk about our products. It's bigger than life. That's not the daily work. The daily work is getting in touch, getting in control of what drives you the most. We said, let's do something unorthodox for a big media company. Let's do a video, a mood board, what it actually means, and let people just express what it means to be part of NENT.
We got out at the end of that process with something a little bit different.
What is the beat?
It's the tempo, the speed that makes me go forward.
It's a rhythm we all have. It's what makes me tick.
First of all, we're all born with it. Everyone.
It's when I surround myself with the people I trust. I can really let my guard down.
Maybe we need to feel uncomfortable in order to conquer and finally beat our fears.
I like when I can take my time, kind of skip a beat.
Give twice as much to the next moment.
It has to start with me. Nothing can beat the feeling of knowing that someone else.
Someone you don't know.
somewhere else feels.
Feels the same way.
feels the same way as you do.
I've learned that courage lasts longer when shared with others.
I sometimes use it as a compass. If my pulse gets so loud I can't hear, then I know I'm doing something right.
It's a path I love to get really lost in.
Almost to the point I forget what I'm actually doing.
If I let myself believe that every new idea
Every new voice
Could matter to the world out there, in the blink of an eye, we might have a new story.
It is different from what you typically see when media companies describe who they are. We think we love this, of course, and it may take some time to grow on you. Once you get this emotional connection working from the bottom up in a company out to the products, you create something that is immensely powerful. Everything that we compete with, that is not just the Netflix and the C More and whatever of the world. It's an emotional attachment to the products in a world where everything can be churned from in a heartbeat. It fits together. We have a vision. We have been very specific about it for some time now. We want to be the leading Nordic streaming service provider and content developer with a global appeal. The global part of it, I'll come back to.
We're a focused Nordic company. There is a global aspect to it that is very, very important. Our values, as I've just described them, how they fit together, and the purpose. This is what we have built over the last years leading up to where we are today. We're still, and I say this often when I meet all of our employees, we're a construction site. Any company wanting to be around for quite some time need to be a constant construction site. We have to reinvent ourselves many, many, many times. You're witnessing one reinvention of ourselves right now. The key priorities for us as a company, best-in-class streaming services, both tech and content, and everything related to how it's sold, how it's consumed, how we can serve the customers.
The most relevant entertainment experiences, entertainment in the future, we believe, go well beyond that TV series or that match. There is so much more that we have to deliver on to be sustainable in a very, very competitive media landscape going forward. The team, we cannot serve our customers if we don't stand united as a team. That's quite clear. For us, with everything that we come from, we don't start from scratch. We have a history. We have things in our history that we have to deal with and do differently because it's different times now. A sustainable approach. Being sustainable is not just delivering the 10th consecutive quarter of profitable growth. It's about delivering the 55th on the basis of a business that you can stand tall behind. It means so much more. Sustainability, very important.
We're going to move over to streaming and talk about Viaplay. It is a unique service. It's present on more functionalities and platforms than any other service in the Nordics. It's actually not available on cinema. We don't have any plans to go into that. EST, electronic sell-through, when you buy and keep your favorite movies. TVOD, going to the video store, renting your favorite movie digitally, it's available with us. SVOD, obviously, that's the core of the whole service, subscription video on demand. SVOD sports, where we have and will continue to fight for our undisputed leadership position in sports in the Nordics. Premium sports for, in most cases, more than one of the 4 countries we're in. TV everywhere, available for our customers and the channels that we cater for together with our distributor partners. It is quite unique.
There is nobody else covering all of this. It's also a challenge because we have to be mindful about not spreading ourselves too thin. We have to be mindful about Viaplay not becoming too cumbersome to manage as a consumer. You will see us focus on various elements of these various components over time in different ways to develop it. Right now, it's all about subscription build-up, getting subscribers, building the service. Yes, we make good money from renting out films and selling films. That's fantastic. That's not the core of Viaplay right now. It's a great feature to have moving into the future. On all major devices, also unique. We've just added Google Home as the only SVOD service in the Nordics. All of these platforms are used to consume our content on various levels.
Both Apple and Android TV is bigger than you probably would given credit for because people watch TV through that little device, and they do it on Viaplay and on other video-on-demand services. I think you can all recognize that behavior. Being available, getting out there, being sort of in the face of the consumers in a good way, that is very, very important. This is a number that over the last couple of years and when we started this journey, in all the meetings with many of you, how many Viaplay subscribers do you have? Yeah, we don't. Now we can tell you. It's a good number. 1.3 roughly, a little less. It's basically in line with most of the research that you probably have seen. It puts us in a very good position. We've come a long way.
I'll put this number in a little bit perspective in just a few minutes. It has grown since 2016 up to now, 34%. Markets, we expect them to be growing around 20% also going forward. As penetration increases, that will probably plateau over time, but right now we're still in very early phases of this growth. Today Viaplay, from a subscription point of view, is a bigger service than our Viasat direct consumer, meaning DTH, and our third-party distributors combined. In addition to this number, in these customer bases, roughly a million, we have 504 Viaplay accounts activated that are not counted in this number. A little less than 400,000 of those, a little more than 500,000, are active users of Viaplay. We don't count them obviously, because they get that as an embedded service. They're bundled into Viasat.
This means, and we have seen it, that the churn, I'll come back to that again a little bit later, the churn on these platforms when Viaplay is a component is significantly lower. We're creating a relationship with those customers through the traditional platforms. Even if we cannot add the number to this number, it is a substantial number that I'm not sure everybody else when they report the numbers would have deducted from the customer base. We want to be clear about our growth path. 1.258 paying subscribers acquired direct to consumer. They've come to us and bought the service. Just to make that very clear. Over time, obviously, as you develop the service, you should expect lower churn. We've accomplished that since 2013.
Churn is down almost 60%, from a fairly immature service with tech issues to a very stable service with a lot more content, churn should come down. It does. We don't give the exact number, but for many of you who follow mobile operators, we are slightly better on churn than most average mobile operators. Stream minutes. It's growing, but not that much. This is an area that we want to grow, and you will hear a lot about investments today that is there to increase usage to drive down churn even further. That is very important. You see the dip in the summer. That's the sports. What can we do to work with that to make sure we don't get the dip in the summer when there is no Premier League or Champions League? Those are all things that we are working with.
We're still very strong when it comes to stream minutes by comparison. We have a high engagement rate among our consumers with Viaplay, but there is more to do. Everything is moving in the right direction. Another thing that is very important to understand is what kind of pricing power we think we can have in the product going forward. One concern that is important to address and that we have been working with very focused is obviously the move from traditional pay TV over to SVOD. What most originally assumed would be an ARPU dump. You take high-paying traditional pay TV subscriber, you replace them with a fantastic SVOD service, priced in the same range as a good pizza. How is that good business?
Well, it is over time when you grow the SVOD service and you align your prices so there is no ARPU dump on the horizon. What you have here is the Viaplay prices that we have increased gradually since 2012. Today, the top of the pops product, SEK 449, that's sports and what we call TM, TV, movie, and series. That's the Netflix analog, just to be clear. That's the pricing point. At the same time, we've adjusted our prices on the traditional pay TV platforms down towards the same pricing and used that as a tool to reduce churn to get a better CLV out of the traditional pay TV customers. When they eventually move, prices are aligned so we can move them to Viaplay and make the same kind of ARPUs, get the same kind of money out of those customers.
That's the journey that we have started to be able to do the transformation, there is no steep fall ahead of us. That is controlled. Yes, there are still households. I am still one of those households that pay an enormously high bill every month. Obviously I don't call customer service. That would be bad form to complain about my bill. The fact of the matter is, it costed a lot more only a few years ago. There are still a few customers like that, but there are a lot less of those customers than you would assume, because we've moved them and they're staying with us because they're happy. This transformation, this journey is very important to understand how we are transforming traditional pay TV into modern pay TV without doing this journey in the process.
Subscription video on demand is a significant opportunity in the Nordics. Penetration is growing fast. It's slightly south of 50% today across the four countries where we're operating. It's expected to grow significantly, like traditional TV did, from very low levels up to almost 100%. Only this will go much faster. The penetration in the Nordic households is roughly one point services per every other household. That means there is a lot of growth because we will subscribe to more services per household as consumers, and we will deliver more to more households. The growth is twofold: penetration and number of services per household. If we just take these numbers, 12.3 million households in the Nordics, we have 1.3 roughly million subscribers in Viaplay today. That means that we are in 10.4% roughly in the Nordic households, and we're still way ahead of the curve.
Imagine how much we have ahead of us. As we worked on this strategy, we said that we can take traditional into a digital future and actually build a business that is much bigger based on these new platforms. Number one position in sports, we will work very hard to keep that. It is extremely important for us to have one market share for the subscriptions, but always to have a higher revenue market share. That is the pivotal part of the journey that we are on. Investments in content. Originals, yes, but also this kind of content. You will hear a lot from Jakob later when we talk about the breadth of services that we have in the content side of things. We have today issued three press releases, content related. I'll come back to that. User experience. We've invested heavily in tech.
We started, as I said, back in 2007, chose a platform that turned out to not be a great platform, and moved to different platforms. Those kind of platform migrations, they're expensive, they're cumbersome, they're risky, and they're very painful for most customers. Better to do it early in your life as a company. You don't wait and wait and wait because it is very difficult to get up to speed if you wait for too long. You have to pay more and you risk losing a lot more customers because you will have more customers at that point in time. I don't see any Viaplay killers around the corner when it comes to platforms. We've invested heavily to make sure that we can compete with the best. Sometimes we're even leading development. We were the first in the world with offline mode and download for SVOD services.
In most cases, we will make sure we're a fast follower so we can follow what is very, very hot out there, and we will be straight behind. Probably too expensive and too much to ask that we will lead all the development, but we will try. The second area, adding to this and also underlining the opportunity with growth, is business to business, which for us is more or less a greenfield opportunity. We have not done many B2B deals. When I say B2B deals, I mean we give Viaplay as a service to a distributor to put on the set-top boxes. We haven't done much of that because we want to control the user experience. Coming back to the slide before, everything that we provide directly to consumer need to be equally good when provided through a third party.
We have worked with the distributors and we have very fruitful dialogues. We announced one, no, two actually, two big distribution agreements today with Stofa and the bigger one with TDC/YouSee in Denmark, where Viaplay is a critical part of that multi-year distribution agreement to get on the boxes, to get more out to the consumers. Now we can do it in a controlled way from a user experience point of view. Some of the others where we have seen significant growth in the market, especially HBO, I would say in the early days, put all of their eggs into the B2B basket, which means that an HBO customer in the beginning, getting HBO content through a box, only got a subset of the content. That was a way in, and now I think they're tilting towards the other way, which is fine.
We're just doing the other way around. B2B is a significant opportunity for us. We have come a long way. Last week, very timely, research came out saying that, and this is very small, but 89% of the SVOD streaming services in Europe is generated by five services. It's Netflix, Amazon, and Sky. Those are the three biggest. It's HBO and Viaplay. 89% of the service revenues generated on SVOD streaming, five services. We have the same size as HBO. Being in four markets, they have slightly more. And yes, we have sports, so it's not entirely like for like, but nonetheless, we have come a long way in generating revenues with our SVOD service. Bear in mind, it's only 10.4% penetration in the Nordic households. You can think about how much more we have ahead of ourselves.
The other side of the coin is advertising. Advertising is becoming a smaller part of our business. We're a more subscription-driven business today than we were only a couple of years ago. We like subscriptions. We like the subscription business. It's high margins. It's a good way to stay close to the market, to develop partnerships, but it's also more volatile. We have more consciously driven down the share of advertising in our revenue base Free TV, advertise-based free linear TV is not growing, but it's still very stable, and you can work with it in a very dynamic way. You will get hands-on examples from Filippa later on how we work with it in Sweden together with the other platforms to form a very powerful tool. What's next for video? For us, it's Viafree.
Viafree is our extension of traditional advertising funded TV on a digital platform, AVOD, advertising video on demand. It's not just catch up, it's not just the formats that you recognize from Norway or Denmark, Sweden on Viafree. It's made for platform content, it's typically shorter form and more younger skewing. That's why we call it millennial TV. There's a lot of great content on there. It's a fairly broad service, but it caters for a different need. Different need for the consumers, certainly a different need for the advertisers. Many of the advertisers have only been able to reach this very important target group through YouTube. YouTube, big as it is a fairly crude tool if you want to reach straight into the right target group, because you cannot guarantee that you get exactly 15-24-year-olds.
You cannot guarantee if you go on YouTube that you don't get your commercial affiliated to a clip that you certainly don't want to be affiliated with. That is a problem. This is not about sort of pushing YouTube out of the equation. It's about providing a local, high-quality, premium digital advertising service for the advertisers alongside YouTube. We've come a long way. We've grown the service. The AVOD revenues are growing very steadily. Very high quality of the service. It goes back and forth. In some quarters, we will be the loser in the market because we haven't provided the right content at the time. Some quarters we will be the winner. That's just the dynamics of it. We have 3 million downloaded apps, a little bit more in the Nordics.
More than 1 million logged in users in Sweden that has allowed us to increase prices quite a lot on this service in Sweden, we'll roll this out in the other markets when we're ready. We're in a good position with Viafree. Sometimes, like we did in Q4, we said we want to give a little bit of extra boost to Viaplay. We moved some content from Viafree over to Viaplay because we can do that. That's part of our ecosystem. That's how we manage the services. Yes, then we get a weaker quarter in one area, but a much stronger quarter in another, and combined, it gives us a better position. It is the perfect sale funnel to Viaplay.
These cord cutters or cord never households, they will move in the future into various solutions when the parents no longer pay for the SVOD services. Obviously, we want to create a top-of-mind relationship with this very important target group for Viaplay. Viafree is a great tool to do that and making money in the process. Very good. Will it ever become of equal size as traditional linear advertising revenues? Well, at some point maybe, but it's not in the near future because there is so much power left to be harvested from linear advertising, linear TV advertising. Don't expect this to take over from free TV anytime soon. Maybe in the future, but I think the long tail for linear TV is quite long. All of this is, of course, about content. If we put up a picture like this, it becomes very hard to grasp.
What is all of this? How is this different? When you as consumers use various SVOD service, you will all be opinionated. You will have an opinion around who has the best series, obviously based on your preference. Who has the biggest library? Who knows? Who's counting all the films? Who has the best sports? Yeah, well, that's maybe whether you like Formula One or football or the local leagues. It's all very sort of opinion-based up to a certain point. When you come to that certain point, if you don't have critical mass and enough great content, you will not be able to compete. We invest a lot. Series acquired from the U.S. and other markets. Movies, similarly, U.S. and other markets.
We do more than 50,000 hours of live sports every year, significantly more than any one of the given public service channels in the various countries. Then we have the originals. We'll come back to the originals. Then we have our Studios. Why is Studios such a great part of our business? I've been challenged along the way saying, "Well, it's very volatile and it's a bit margin dilutive," and all sorts of very good reasoning for why it may be sort of something that we should put on the sell side of things. In my head, it's not. We want to be in tune with what happens out there. We want to be able to attract the best scriptwriters, the best directors, the best stars.
We accept that we cannot have everything on our own channels. Our studios obviously have to sell to others, and we love to do that. We love to do that. In some cases, we can co-produce with them and put it on different channels. But most importantly is that great content will become a scarce resource in the future. Even if there is still enough scripts out there for the very much growing demand, the quality will differ. For us to be the leading Nordic provider of great content in the Nordics, it means we have a secure pipeline. When we start to internalize more of that production into our own, it gives us a better margin uplift, assuming that that content delivers more subscribers.
There's a good reason to be a complete suite of services, both in the consumer-fronting end of things and on the studio side of things. We have to vertically integrate more. We have to get more out of it, and you should follow us and look for that as we go along, because that's an important part. We operate on arm's length to make sure that we can stand tall when it comes to how we deal with our competitors that are also our consumers, customers, et cetera. But above and beyond that, you should look for us getting more out of our studios business internally. Get that right, it's a significant upside for us. Sports rights, we have a few. This is not an exhaustive list, so there could be a lot more, but these are the biggest ones. Competition on sports rights is fierce.
We've been in this for many years, and I've been trying to buying sports rights back in my telco days, stealing content from telcos. Failed every time. This is difficult. The failure is not by buying the content, it's by actually producing something. When you sit at it and say, "Should I bid a little bit more? Can I actually develop a channel that is good enough? Will I attract the talent needed to make that channel a success?" That is difficult. Takes more than deep pockets. The rights that we have, these are the key rights, secured, most of them, up to 2021 and beyond. We recently secured Premier League, key right. Champions League is the next one up for renewal. 2021 is the next season that we have secured, and then there is an auction before that.
We will work very hard to keep our sports rights, but not at crazy inflation rates, which is why the breadth of service is so important. I do think that we will see a more industrial approach, both from sellers and buyers on the sports rights side of things. We've seen some signs of that. I also think we, as others, will have to think about new ways of cooperating with those who might be bidding for sports rights. Not only the other broadcasters, but maybe distributors and other platforms as well, to find ways of creating new services to the benefit of both companies, instead of going through a very painful process of just driving inflation on the sports rights. We stand strong. There is nothing coming up, as I said, before the season 2021.
In second half of 2021 is the first window where we could be without one of these rights. Not that we will, but we could. Second, very important, I will not dwell too much upon it because Jakob will come back on it, but this is key. There is a change here in our thought. If you remember when I said we have to lift the usage on the service. Churn is down, sales is up, usage is stable to slightly growing. It has to grow a lot more. The originals, they are very important for us to establish a position and to get customers into the service. It's the library and the breadth of content, especially Hollywood content, that creates the relationship with the consumer, the glue to the relationship, if you will.
Making sure that after having watched the original, you can binge-view all the first 20, whatever it is, seasons of "Grey's Anatomy." If you go in and look at the 100 most popular movies on IMDb, we should make sure we have enough of those movies. We recognized some time ago that we were not strong enough on movies. We were strong, especially on the first pay windows, meaning we get the latest films first, fairly strong, not strong enough on the library. We embarked on a journey to make sure that we could secure better first windows, even more of the latest blockbusters on our platform, but it had to be bundled with more library. We would move up the ranks of the 100 most popular films through the times, because they make a difference.
We've added, in addition to the Disney, Universal, Sony, and 20th Century Fox, we now added MGM, and we've extended NBCU. We've also extended Fox. For all of those of you who are sitting concerned about where "The Simpsons" would end up and "How I Met Your Mother", I can now say safely that you can watch it also for another year with us. The most important thing here is that we get a lot of volume of fantastic series. MGM, obviously the "Bond" franchise have to be mentioned. There is so much more, the first pay window approach is a little bit old-school pay TV thinking, which is fine because that worked back in the day. You had a pay TV channel, you made sure that people paid fairly high subscriptions to get Movies coming out of the cinema quickly on that.
That was the way it was done. You didn't broadcast old stuff because that was for free TV. SVOD is built on something different. Yes, you may want to watch "A Star Is Born," that's fine. Then it's Saturday night, shouldn't we do a couple of "The Godfathers?" Yeah, you were laughing and you said, "No, I would never do that." We know. Fact of the matter is, we have to make sure we have those services on our platform because that creates a relationship that goes well beyond just watching "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "A Star Is Born." Here we've taken a big leap forward. More on that from Jakob later. Viaplay originals, there is no substitute when it comes to creating top of mind to local drama. Local drama means we connect in a unique way with our consumers. That's the way we can compete with the globals.
If you ask me the question, is it realistic to compete with Netflix? Well, no, not if we try to be a local version of Netflix. That's not possible. We can certainly compete with them on the studio stuff, because now with what we just showed you, we will be in line with, or in some cases, stronger than Netflix. Our differentiation has to be something else. This is where our originals, minimum 20 high-budget, high-ambition originals per year, minimum. That's the kind of ambition level that we have. 2019 is the first year where we premiere 20 originals. I say minimum because in the best of worlds, we will have one premiering, one service releasing a new episode every week with a break in the summer probably. That's the kind of volumes.
Most of them, but not all, in Nordic languages, some of them English with a, or a couple Nordic languages, some of them in English with Nordic actors. There will be a Nordic angle in it. That's the reason why we embarked on the joint venture with FilmNation, the world's leading indie studio with a number of Oscars on the shelf. They wanted to go into TV series, English language, based out of the U.K. We come in as partner, we get the Nordic first looks for that content, then the content can travel, so we can finance fairly high-budget productions by the international opportunities. We're a good partner for FilmNation, because a lot of things that happens first, happens in the Nordics first. You will see us doing more of that. Moving over to studios. I talked about the importance and the value of studios.
The size of studios is maybe not known to all of you, 32 production companies, mostly in the Nordics, but we also have businesses down in Central Eastern Europe and in Holland. Catering for actually the majority of Nordic business-oriented content on all broadcasters in the Nordics. It's basically dominated by three groups. You have the Endemol Shine and the Banijays and NENT Studios. We're the Nordic alternative. The others are, as you know, owned from outside the Nordics. We are the largest Nordic production company. It is above and beyond everything else, a fantastic access to creativity. Yes, good margins. Morten, the head of NENT Studios, he sits over there, so I don't want lower margins, just to be clear. The most important thing is to get access to creative content and people. We want to expand the value chain.
Our in-house capabilities will step up. More originals on the back of in-house capabilities, partnerships like the one with FilmNation, new ventures on the horizon that we will look forward to come back and talk to you about in a not too distant future. That's the way we see the content business evolving. Coming back to the team, the operational excellence. We are in an enormously competitive industry because we need the best tech people, and for that, we need to compete with Spotify and Klarna and a few others, fantastic companies. We have to be equally attractive as them. Probably more. Obviously, both behind and in front of the camera, the best people should come to us first. That's why we need to be clear about this pyramid, who we are, what we do, and what we do not.
The tech team, some more than 300 people, 27 nationalities in that team, which is fantastic. People move from other parts of the world to come and work for us and develop Viaplay because it is a cutting-edge service. We rate high at the universities as a next destination for the skilled technicians. All of this is something that is absolutely paramount to our business, to continue to attract these people, make them stay longer. These are often sort of tech nomads. They move around the world and learn more. We want them to stay longer, move out, and come back to us so we can deliver alongside the best. Investments in tech have been fairly stable once we ramped it up to a certain level. You will hear more from Gabriel on that. We're not a CapEx-driven business.
We like to use as little CapEx as possible to keep our earnings clean, so to speak. We'll continue with that, but we will continue to invest in tech. We have delivering this, as I said now a couple of times, from 2007 up till now. The whole team, this is also very important. We've come a long way. We started at lower levels when there was a lot of ambiguous sort of beliefs where MTG was going, especially in what was then perceived as the old parts of MTG. People didn't really necessarily see a future. That is not something that has happened since July when we named ourselves NENT. We started that work some years ago. It takes time to get people sort of on board, motivated, and engaged. 86% of our team responded in the latest employee engagement survey.
That's a high number, above the usual benchmarks. 91% are willing to go that extra mile. That is so important in a company. 87% proud is a very high number. There will always be people that have found something that they're not proud of. I think that number can be higher than 87%, but still by benchmarks, very high. I often tell myself and my team that you have to deliver on the 80-20 rule. 80% of the time at work needs to be fun. We spend so much time on it. Hey, 100% will never be fun. There is always something that is not fun, but it cannot be more than 20%. We have to be able to deliver that every day. We step up early, go to bed late. In between, fun needs to be an important component. We want to do it in a sustainable way.
We want to be very clear about who we are, what we do, what kind of behavior we instigate on ourselves and on the people working for and with us. Our codes of conduct, they're not negotiable. They're not open for interpretations. This is how we do business. Our industry has been through, I would say, cleaning in some aspects over the last years. A very welcome one, I would say. We have been fairly shielded from too much problems. The history is not what's important, it's what we define as the future. Equality, diversity, inclusion, and no tolerance policy for abusive behavior or bullying, that has nothing to do with Nordic Entertainment. That is very clear. It has to be very clear. It goes back to our ability to attract the best people. It's good business. With all of this, we are in almost all Nordic households.
In Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we are in all the households every day. In Finland, we don't have free TV or radio, we don't make it all the way. This position to be in all those households and to have that cross-promotion power that sort of entails, that is a very important component in the streaming story that I'm so excited about. We can make money about marketing ourselves in as many households as possible and for as long as we possibly can. This is maybe the biggest financial differentiator of them all for us. Our content team, probably the best in the Nordics, if not Europe or even the world. They have renegotiated all of our contracts, the old ones, very painful, very forceful on the new ones, saying we are paying for a right, not per subscriber or per platform.
We're paying, and we're paying once. We can monetize as we see fit, because otherwise it's impossible to be a challenger in SVOD and grow if you have to pay more for every new subscriber coming on board. That will kill the business model. We know there are peers out there in Europe that are trailing behind, especially on this opportunity, because they are stuck in that model. There is no business case to go for this. You buy, I don't know, classifieds or travel agencies or whatever instead, because you get stuck. We're not stuck. We can move content between the various platforms. The hockey stick effect from Viaplay as we grow above and beyond the 1.258 that we have today, that is quite significant. This is the whole reason why we can do it from a financial point of view.
I think that we have very clear differentiators. We are a leader, but we have always to be a challenger, both in reality and in mindset. If you're number 1, think like number 2. If you think you're a good number 2, think about how it is to be number 4. You move things. Streaming leadership, of course. This is a streaming story that we're telling you about today. We have a unique way of making money from our content and our platforms and the content leadership. The global approach is important. They know who we are in Hollywood, not just because we buy stuff, but because they want to work with us going forward. Not just there.
This is very important because that can set us apart from the ones, especially the local competitors, that may have a free TV leadership that we don't have any interest in investing in trying to take over. We have to be bigger and better. Very important, you remember I talked about the decreasing impact from advertising and the importance of it. Right now, we are talking about subscription revenues being roughly 60%. That includes carriage fees. Everything that has nothing to do with advertising is 60%. 28% is advertising, TV, AVOD, and radio. We have studios. This is a different model that we have very deliberately worked hard to develop over the last years, is more robust in the event of a downturn or recession in the future. We know both from experience and from empirical data that subscription businesses are impacted a lot less.
Advertising, obviously very volatile. We want to put ourselves in a position that a recession that impacts our advertising side of the business wouldn't mean anything for us. We should be able to deal with that from other parts of the business. That's the ambition. We're not there fully yet. 28% is still a chunk, but it's a lot less than only five years ago. We want to talk about profitable growth. We think the balance that we are striking between investing heavily in content and our services and being profitable, that's the best way of orchestrating this business and creating shareholder value. That includes paying out dividends 30%-50%, as we have said in our policies. If the question is why pay out at all, why not invest everything? Are you not missing an opportunity in not using all the cash into streaming?
We're actually taking as much as we possibly can on board right now. It's better than to have a balanced way of attracting interest from the market. We are both fully committed and fully believing in the fact that delivering continued, sustainable, profitable growth is doable. We've delivered nine consecutive quarters now, and in the process, bought and developed more content than anybody else and acquired 1.3 million SVOD subscribers, far ahead of comparable competition. Our approach to growth will remain to be focused on our core business, supportive to our core business. It has to be profitable. We may buy something that is not profitable, it has to be very small so we can actually take some benefits out of it. It will not impact our profitability.
If it's of a certain magnitude or an investment is of a certain magnitude, it needs to be profitable. It needs to create tangible shareholder value. We believe that the best way you can do that in a focused business is by making sure that it's very close to the business. You will not see us drift off into the adjacencies of various digital opportunities. That is not what this is about. Any day spent not thinking about how to get more streaming subscribers is a lost day. That sounded a bit dogmatic, but that's a little bit how it is for us. Today, we have roughly 25% volume market share on Viaplay.
We're a lot smaller in traditional pay TV, our journey has already, as you saw also from the absolute numbers earlier, the journey to be a leader in streaming and no longer be a pay TV operator in the same size, that has already begun. Importantly, our revenue market share is significantly higher than those 25%, given the fact that we have sports. The proposition to our investors is that we actually have a very unique position and a unique play on the Nordic streaming market. There is no such other service out there in the Nordics, that's for sure. There is actually no one in Europe. I think it's great that ITV and BBC get together to create BritBox. Fantastic. Great content. Ten years too late. Content is at the core of everything that we do, and being different is important.
Being different doesn't mean that we don't want all that fantastic Hollywood content that anybody can buy. We just want to make sure we buy it in our way and package it in our way. Track record, I think we have established. The team, I'm blessed with a fantastic team around me. Brilliant. As you will hear from Gabriel, we have a very clear idea of how we want to use the money that we create in the company. Leading Nordic streaming service provider, content developer with a global appeal means that we, in the future, will be far beyond just a Nordic company, even if we're Nordic-focused. We're so much more than that. I can say certainly on behalf of myself and on behalf of the whole team, we are super excited, very thankful for the trust that we have been given by shareholders, our board.
The journey in which we have split MTG into two different but distinctively interesting companies has been a fantastic one. We are very excited about this.
A great first half, I hope you'll agree. Thank you very much, Anders.
Thank you.
We're going to take 20 minutes now out in the lobby, then please join us again for the second half. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Welcome back, everyone. I hope you got coffees and drinks and are feeling refreshed. We had one presentation in the first half. You get three for the price of one in the second half. We're going to have three people on stage, then Q&A at the end. You heard Anders talk all about streaming, now we're going to unpack that a little bit more for you. You've often heard the phrase that content is king. We have our own resident king of content, Mr. Jakob Mejlhede, who's now going to come on stage and talk to us about all things Hollywood, all things original, all things content related, then we'll take your questions at the end. Thank you, Jakob.
I'm making a shortcut here to avoid the stumbling. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. I am so lucky to have the opportunity to address you and talk about the great passion I have, the content that also happens to be my work. We buy for approximately SEK 7 billion of content every year, which makes us one of the leading content buyers in Europe and by far the largest content buyer in the Nordic region. Let's start up with a few examples of the content we have. I wanted to give the folks a little sizzle.
Yes.
Hey.
What?
Who got the power?
Is this what you really want?
How charming.
I want to give the audience a song that they can perform.
I think you're beautiful. Right now, you're fucking ready.
Goosebumps.
Who got the power?
Yeah, I'm a machine when I do it. I'll be catching fire, gasoline when I do it. Maybe you could take it, take it way downtown. Bet the way I move it, got a stick it lockdown.
We have everything from the world's leading sports rights and sport leagues and our unique coverage of those rights to our vibrant and colorful reality shows and our gripping documentaries and factual shows to our Nordic originals, which you're going to hear a lot more about today. Our American TV series, both new, but also the box sets of the classics that you love and want to watch or watch again. We have a great selection of some of the strongest kids content in the world. We have an outstanding selection of movies. We've expanded our movie selection with a couple of new deals, which were announced this morning, which we are going to look more at later on. We have a very unique possibility in monetizing across all the different windows.
We can monetize across TVOD and EST, the sales cycles that happens just after the cinematic window, down through first pay, the window that is available to all Viaplay customers, and all the way down to the library where a movie becomes a classic. That is a great thing to have from an exploitation point of view, but it is also a great thing to have when it comes to the exploitation of our negotiation opportunities, because if some cycle drops in value, if there is some decrease, then we can balance that out in another cycle where there is an increase in usage. That happens. We have seen that happening in linear viewing, where there has been a decrease in linear viewing. It has decreased 7%, but that is so far outbalanced by the increase in digital viewing.
SVOD viewing has increased 13%, which is something that really works for a multi-platform setup. Yes, there is less people watching linear TV, but it is not the case if you look at the overall picture. More and more people are watching video. It is moving to digital, and it is moving to SVOD, and we are present across all those cycles. Again, bear in mind the negotiation aspect of it. We can negotiate across these two different currencies at the same time, which makes it possible for us to create a very good and sustainable economy in our content work. If we take a look at what is happening behind the SVOD window, it is very fascinating to see that it is not only one category that is growing in usage. It is all categories that are increasing when it comes to the usage of them.
Some of them are increasing more than other and on Viaplay, kids have really taken a jump upwards and so has TV series. TV series is probably one of the most important phenomenons right now because it is that boom in viewing that we also support with our original ambitions. I think it is something that has to do with you falling in love, not only with a great story, a great murder plot, a great love story. You fall in love with characters. You fall in love with characters that you see fighting evil or having fun troubles, and you follow them over hour after hour, season after season, falling in and out of love with one another until the good or bitter end, and we just cannot get enough of that. Our users certainly cannot.
We are doing everything we can to ensure that we have a business that is tailored for the future, we have done that for many, many years. We pride ourselves of being ahead of the curve, we do that through a few different things, which I am going to talk about now. We have set up a very successful multi-platform buying behavior, buying structure, sometimes a buying religion. We have built partnerships that is not your normal buyer-seller relationship, but something that we call a 360-degree relationship, something that is a multi-pronged business relationship with our suppliers, that makes it more attractive to sell content to us. We are creating our digital-first content, which is a good way to produce the most interesting content for services such as Viafree, but also a great way to attract talent that wants to work with the NENT Group.
We're actively pursuing category leadership where it makes the most sense for us and where we feel we can grow the business, we're well on track to having category leaderships within the most important categories. We focus very much on Nordic storytelling. We are from the Nordic region, and we believe we can create a close connection to our audience by having the strongest stories available on our services. We also do that by moving closer to where the story come from, the book or the great idea that a creator has. We are getting as close to the IP creation that we possibly can.
When it comes to the multi-platform buying or the way that we do content or do content deals, we do it in a way where we try to create a product that delivers a lot of great opportunities for both the viewers but also for our business. We are quite proud of what we have achieved. We have managed to achieve deals that are scalable. Usually, deals used to have a so-called CPS cost, a cost per subscriber, which meant that your cost also increased as you grew in size. As Anders mentioned before, it's something we've moved away from. Our deals are scalable. Our deals are fixed cost, the cost doesn't move as we increase our volume of consumers, which is a great benefit, and it enables us to buy more content if that is the right thing to do for our businesses.
Our deals are flexible. We started negotiating all these digital rights a long time ago. We started doing digital deals back in 2007, 2008, when we had Viasat On Demand. We started changing our whole deal religion or deal-making religion a long time ago as well. We don't do deals that's only a simple deal aimed for free TV or for network. We do deals that have digital components that have SVOD utility that can be used on Viafree, the vast majority of our deals are flexible. It's something that I think you should bear in mind, started a very long time ago. It's not something you can do overnight. When you think of other media companies, bear in mind that this has been a very, very long process.
Some of the work that we started many years ago is what has resulted in the content that is on Viaplay because we started having the digital world and the development in mind when we negotiated our deals. Our deals are also flexible in another way. We work with sub-licensing as an important part of our deal structures. Sub-licensing means that we can sub-license our content to other players and operators across the region, it has multiple benefits. It means that we can scale down on some content if we don't feel that it's the right content for our services. It also means that we can enter into meaningful partnerships with our partners in the market, where we can negotiate that they get access to a movie package that we have.
We create these deep relationships that gives us a good potential to discuss not only a sub-licensing deal, but also, in many cases, a co-production deal or a joint deal around that, because we believe that way of forming partnerships is something that gives us a great strength to deliver content for our services. Some of the deals we do in the international market, we often refer to as 360-degree relationships. We do that because they embrace more than just a simple deal or a simple buyer-seller relationship, which I talked of before. A couple of examples of that are some of the deals we have with Viacom and also with Fox. We have a deal with Viacom, which provides thousands of hours of exclusive kids content of the highest caliber for Viaplay. That's not our Viacom relationship.
Our Viacom relationship is also around channel carriage, the carriage of some of Viacom's great channels on Viasat. It's also something that has to do with movies coming from the Viacom group. It's not only that, it's also a deal that has to do with Viacom's ad sales in the Nordic region. It's a deal that helps and supports their ambitions to get the most out of their ad sales ambitions. There are many other examples of that. The deals also cater for the need we have on AVOD, advertiser-funded activities on Viafree. It's also deals that has thousands of other hours of factual content for Viaplay. One of the things we did not too long ago, we wanted to increase the amount of factual shows and documentaries on our [Dplay service.
We felt that the overall relationship with Fox, which, of course, has the Nat Geo channels, was something that was a great opportunity for us to funnel amazing factual content into Viaplay. The benefit of these relationships is that it is not just easy to say no to something. It's something that has so many different aspects, business aspects, where we try to do what is best for our business, but we have our suppliers' business in mind as well when we do these deals to ensure that we really go hand in hand into a new and exciting future. Digital-first content is something that's been a lot of talk about over the years, and coming from the U.S. where I'm based presently, it's something that is very much talk of the town.
There's a big thing being launched right now called Pluto TV, and it's filling the streets of L.A., and I'm quite proud of being from the company that launched Viafree three years ago, because in essence, Viafree does some of the same things that Pluto TV does, just way better. Viafree came from the past as a catch-up service for our TV channels. All the great shows that you wanted to watch on demand coming in from TV3, that being "The Luxury Trap" or "Paradise Hotel," was the backbone of Viafree. We realized that there was a completely other trend happening. There was this search for short-form content, on-the-go content, snackable content. That meant we wanted to do something more. We wanted to launch dedicated programming for Viafree. Not only program we develop, but also program we license, which is only aimed for Viafree.
We now have a service which is growing in strength with new amazing shows, own developed and acquired. I think we have the tremendous strength in also having the Nordic's leading short-form production company, Splay One, which is the go-to place for young talent who wants to use their talents to produce new, interesting, amazing, creative content in all forms and shapes. We marry this talent with market insights and with brands. They, together with us, get the ability to capitalize on the talent they have. It's content that is produced for Viaplay as one of the many outlets that Splay One uses. It is also produced for other platforms amongst those, some that shall be unnamed, but big, and other small platforms across the Nordic region. Category leadership is something that we find very important to constantly think about.
How do we ensure that we have the best content for our users within the most important categories? It's a daily struggle, but it's a fun one because we've come quite far, and I think we are on the right path to having the best selection in the categories that we believe are the most important ones. Needless to say, with the chart you saw before over the sports rights, there is no point denying that we are the go-to place for sports. We are the category leader, and no one comes even remotely close to what the NENT Group can offer our customers. We're also strong when it comes to unscripted content. Our reality shows and factual shows are absolute top caliber, and we know that they work extremely well in the demos they are targeted at.
We think that the combination of U.S.-acquired TV series and our originals is going to make us the category leader within TV series. With the Nordic originals, we are coming closer to the audience than anyone else are. That in combination with the great international TV series we have, is something that gives us a significant strength, and we will be the leading TV series provider within a very short time. We're very strong in kids. We have some brilliant deals in place that offers some of the highest quality kids content you can possibly imagine, and we are working on how we can outbuild the category even further to ensure that our youngest customers have the best entertainment available whenever and wherever they please. We talked about the movie category early on, and it's a category where we are now becoming the number one within the movie offering.
We will have that entertainment experience for our consumers, and I believe it's an extremely strong thing to be present and strong in the movie category because there are very few categories that can gather the family on a Friday night after they have watched a big entertainment show, and we have the best blockbusters that you can possibly imagine. Furthermore, we're also outbuilding our tremendously strong blockbuster offering with a deeper selection of library because, yes, there are those days where you just want to watch one of the classics that you've watched again and again. Just to go back to the movie landscape for Scandinavia, for the Nordic region, it looks as this with the announcement of our two newest deals. No one comes even remotely close to our offering of first pay titles.
We have six brilliant deals supported by a Fox second pay deals, which ensures that we have anywhere in between 50 or 100 top fresh movies every year to our viewers and our subscribers. I also want to mention the strength of having a strong ambition when it comes to the local movies, the Nordic movies, because they come very close to us and when they hit and when they go big, they sometimes outperform even the highest budget Hollywood blockbusters. Nordic top titles mainly come from two suppliers, that is Nordisk Film and Scanbox, and those deals are sitting with us, and they are available to our subscribers, our dear Viaplay subscribers.
As mentioned, we announced the NBCUniversal and MGM deals this morning, and I would like to take a minute more to talk about these deals because not only do they provide us with the last installment in the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy, which is a very strong movie both in cinemas but also when it comes to subscription. It's also the movie "First Man" which blew me when I watched it. I thought it was absolutely amazing. It's the next installment in Jurassic Park, which is something I guess a lot of people are looking forward to. It's good old James Bond returning in the new movie, and that will be on Viaplay.
When we do things such as the next new James Bond movie, it's not only a movie, it is the entire library of James Bond. You can be very sure that we will be launching a dedicated 007 universe, which will appeal to both younger and older viewers across our region. We don't only look at buying Creed II, which by the way are great boxing movies. It is also the library of the Rocky movies, so we get the full story on display on Viaplay, which is just such a great entertainment experience. I recently watched Creed II and wanted to start with Rocky from the very beginning. We like to do deals that have many different aspects, and that goes for these two deals as well. These two deals both have TV series elements.
Both some of the shows that you might have watched before and love, like The Office, which is part of one of the packages. It's also some of the most recent talked about shows that too few people have watched yet, Vikings and The Handmaid's Tale, which are coming to Viaplay. It's also a new series, such as a series that I think will be very much anticipated across not only the Nordic market, but globally. The series based on Four Weddings and a Funeral. I think it's going to be an absolute tent-pole across the world. Not only are the deals about movies, library movies, series and library TV series, they are also about some of the other elements we talked about before. It's about carriage, in the case of NBCUniversal. In the case of MGM, it's also about our dear originals.
MGM will become a co-production and distribution partner on a number of Viaplay Original, which speaks for the quality we have in our slate of projects. Viaplay is partnering up with a Hollywood major to ensure we create strong projects with strong international distribution potential. That's how we like to work. This is a partnership and not only a deal. We like to do that, and we like to do more of that. Our blue beating heart is in the Nordic region, and we have done a lot to increase the focus on Nordic storytelling and Nordic Originals. I know there's been a lot of talk about it for quite some time. It takes time developing and producing an Original from the idea, from the instant idea to you see something on screen, on platform, it takes at least two years.
To some extent, you have to be patient. We have been working ahead of the curve. We've been focused on this for a long time, and it is materializing now. Here are a few examples of what we have been spending our time on.
Whoa. Where are we heading now? We're hunting a serial killer. Without ripping it, you need to roll it out. Yeah, you kind of fucked that one up. We need your help, Alex. My heart. What's your name? Wisting. Welcome aboard Aniara. Told you to dress for Fargo. I'm not complaining, am I? This is nothing I remember. You mean you don't remember anything? The devil.
We started up launching three Originals in 2016, and in 2019, this year, we are launching 20 Originals. It's the ambition to keep up that level or to possibly increase that number of Originals for the simple reason that it is good, it's strong, and we believe that to be enough. Bear in mind that the appetite for TV series behind the SVOD window is insatiable. Consumers digest TV series at a pace you have never seen before. Of course, there are the ones of us who don't have time to watch more than an episode or two, but there are loads of consumers that are consuming five, 10 episodes in a go during a weekend when they have time. We need to have a high volume of these tent-pole events during the year. We find 20 to be a reasonable number for now.
We're very proud of the results and the quality that we are showing to our dear customers, because we have originals of the highest caliber coming out right around our ears. The originals are an amazing thing to work with for different reasons. One is that you have complete flexibility when it comes to your exploitation of the originals. You can use them to what they are aimed at, Viaplay the service, but they can also be used for network or for pay TV if we desire that. We can sub-license our originals across the Nordic region, which I think there's very strong potential to do. The license period is another thing that is a great thing when it comes to originals. We are not working within limited license periods. We are working with very long license periods, sometimes indefinite.
That means that they also become a part of building our Viaplay library. A new consumer coming in today has the pleasure of watching Black Lake, which is a great young streaming crime thriller that we put on air a couple of years ago. That makes our service stronger and stronger as we move further into the years. It also gives you complete creative control. If we have a need to do, say, for instance, more young streaming sci-fi or fantasy, that's our choice. I don't need to make sure that there is a supplier ready with that content for me. We start the development of these shows to ensure that we address the audiences we find available or potentially to grow within.
When it comes to talent, we have the possibility to secure we have the best talent on screen and behind the screen to write and to act in our shows. The original is also great when it comes to building business outside the Nordic region. We sell the shows to international markets, that being the BBC or AMC in the U.S. We also sell the right to remake the shows across these markets. It can become not only a Nordic original, but an English language or American original. We are part of that business because we own that position in our originals. The great thing is they work. They absolutely work. Seven out of 10 of the strongest shows, TV series launched on Viaplay last year were originals.
Bear in mind that these shows were up against steep competition with amazing international American shows such as New Amsterdam, what I still believe has the next ER potential. The Brave and Gone and other shows. It's not small shows our originals have been up against inside our service, and they have delivered. We think it's important to think a lot about value chain and monetization at all times. How do we exploit the rights best? How do we negotiate the best way? How do we create a position where we are a strong partner who can use all the different business opportunities that we have within the NENT Group? That also comes to IP creation because that is very much a part of where the value comes from.
The value might come from a book right or it might come from someone just having a great idea. We are so lucky to be in family with some of the Nordic region's leading production companies in the NENT Studios group. We have fun, amazing companies with international ambitions such as Brain Academy, who gave us Swedish Dips, which is one of our first shows. Recently we became in family with EPIQ, a Danish company which specializes in securing IP or book rights at a very early stage. They have this strong relationship to authors and publishers. This combination of companies is a fantastic asset. It is also an opportunity for us to bring more business inside the group, which means that we have even closer access to the talent that produces great content and great ideas.
It also has the benefit of strengthening these companies, because when we develop more content with our own companies, they become stronger companies. They attract more talent, they attract better rights, which makes them not only great companies working for our group, but also great companies working with our colleagues and competitors in the market. We are super proud of the joint venture we are establishing with FilmNation in the U.K. FilmNation is the world's most interesting indie movie producer with titles such as The Imitation Game, The Big Sick, Arrival, and The King's Speech. I couldn't be happier to be the chosen partner when they now want to go into the wonderful world of TV series, and we will be producing hits for the international market and for Viaplay hand in hand. The position we have means that we can move along the value chain.
It means that we can benefit from all the possibilities, all the way from the creation of an idea, from the IP stage, as we call it, through the production of a piece of content, and of course all the way to the streaming and the broadcasting of a piece of content. We can do that internally, I believe it also makes us a perfect partner for local and international companies who wants to work with us. I think we have the benefit of understanding all the different elements so we can choose the right partners when we need to, and we can, in some cases, supplement then with internal resources such as the distribution, if that's what is the right thing for a project. I think we have always tried to look years ahead and to see what is coming next. We are staying ahead of the curve.
We started negotiating digital rights way earlier than anyone in the industry. We started creating a lot of originals back when it seemed both difficult and expensive. We do that because we think about what is going to happen over the next two, three years. We focus on the consumer, what do they want, what are they aiming to do? I think we are a very strong and very future-proof content offering, which I believe will have many victories as we move forward. Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much, Jakob.
Thank you.
Wonderful. Right. Next up, we talk internally a lot about playing the piano. That's an odd phrase, isn't it? What that means is basically thinking about how we utilize all of our products and our windows to their maximum capability and with maximum flexibility. Now we have on stage Filippa Wallestam, who is the CEO of our Swedish operations, our largest operations, and is our in-house accomplished concert pianist. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Matthew. Thank you very much. Thank you all for being here. It's a long but hopefully exciting afternoon. I would like to start by introducing myself since I think I'm a new face to most of you. I've been with the company for five years. I started as head of strategy for free TV and radio across Scandinavia. For the past three years, I've been focusing on Sweden, and that's also where I've been the CEO for the last year. Sorry, this may help. You've now heard Anders and Jakob talk about our strategy and how we're constantly seeking to secure the best content. What I will do is bringing this strategy into life and explain how we use this every day in our Swedish business to drive value. First, I would like to give a short introduction to what NENT is in Sweden.
Sweden is our biggest market. We account for 40% of NENT sales. We have around 400 employees. Sweden is also the market where we have the most comprehensive product portfolio, meaning that Sweden really is the market where we have the ability to play the full piano. We have been very successful. In 2018, we increased organic sales by 8.5%. This was, of course, largely driven by Viaplay, where we rapidly increased number of subscribers. It was also driven by radio, where we managed to have excellent execution on our new licenses, and I will come back to that a little bit later. It is also important to point out that in addition to our growth areas, we have a very healthy TV business that is still growing.
Just one example that you may not think of is that last year, we also increased our premium subscribers on Viasat with 12,000 new customers, and that is excluding Viaplay. How is this possible? Let me dig a little bit deeper into what drives our success. You heard a lot about this, that we do have more windows and higher reach. This means that this gives us unique opportunities to meet our customers where they may want to consume. Today in Sweden, like the rest of the world, people are consuming media in many different ways simultaneously, every day. We have something for everyone. On our free TV channels, we reach nearly 30% commercial share viewing. On our radio stations, we have now passed 40% commercial share of listening, and this is still growing very quickly. On Viasat, we have 550,000 premium customers.
On Viafree, we now have 1 million registered users. On Viaplay, we have an extremely strong position in Sweden. We are the clear number one in sports, and we also have a super strong content offering in TV and movies. This makes our position unique. In fact, we are the only player in the Swedish market that has this wide range of products and services. Why is this important? It is important because it gives us the flexibility to monetize our content in the most efficient way. I will give you some examples of that. If, for example, the ad markets are turning a little bit soft, we can always decide to move some of our content over to our premium services Or the other way around.
If the ad markets are extremely hot, we choose to move some of our sports over to free TV to capture that. This means that we have a unique opportunity to monetize, and therefore, of course, invest in our content. We very often get the question, "How are you going to win about the big global giants?" For me, it is not so much about winning, it is about finding our place. I am very confident looking at our wide range of products and services, that we will continue to be the number one local alternative in Sweden, and rest of the Nordics as well, of course. For us, we are constantly competing against ourselves to be a little bit better every day. We are the best provider of content in Sweden. We do have the most relevant content.
You now heard a lot about the Viaplay originals, I would like to clarify one other thing or another side of our local content, namely our TV entertainment shows. In Sweden only, we produced 45 entertainment shows last year. These are shows ranging from reality TV to factual entertainment and to pure documentaries. These shows are not only completely critical for our free TV channels, they're also a huge driver behind streaming. Again, coming back to our global competitors, if you take these 45 local entertainment shows and you add them up to the Viaplay original number, you do get to a pretty decent volume of shows. I think it's going to take our global competitors quite some time before they reach the same level of volume.
Another cornerstone of our great content offering that we have been talking a lot about today is, of course, our outstanding portfolio of sports rights. Anders showed a similar picture where we were looking at our position in the Nordics. Here I wanted to show you what it looks like in Sweden, also compared to our competitors. As you know, sports rights are not cheap. In order for us to get good ROI, we really need to use our full ecosystem to monetize on these rights. Last year, we managed to add both the handball and German Bundesliga to an already very strong sports portfolio. I think it's fair to say that we really are the home of premium sports in Sweden.
We have been for quite some time, that is important not only because it takes a long time to build up this portfolio of rights. You cannot just get one right and be the best sports player. It's also extremely important in terms of sports production. Today, we are best in class when it comes to sports production in Sweden, and we've been building this for a long time. We can produce extremely high quality in a very efficient way, meaning that when we go out and buy for these not very cheap rights, we know that we have our history and lean production services behind us, giving us the best opportunity to get good return on our investment. In addition to content, we are also always invested in our products where we think we can get good return on investment.
You may remember that I said in the beginning that radio was one of our growth drivers in 2018. That's maybe not what you were expecting. Let me explain why. We had been challenged in radio for quite some time since 2012, when we lost one of our stations and therefore important distribution. When the opportunity came to acquire new licenses, we decided to bid. We won one out of the three national licenses, and almost more importantly, we only paid half of what our main competitor paid for their equal national license. This means that we managed to secure this license at a reasonable cost, giving us the opportunity to continue to invest in the product and promote in the way that we see sustainable for the long term.
We also managed to secure enough local licenses to puzzle together a second network, enabling us to create an extremely strong position in the Swedish radio market. It's still early days. The new licenses were introduced in August last year, so they're still growing. If I just look at Q4 last year, we managed to increase share of listening by 23% and revenue by 33%. In this area, you can definitely rely on more growth in 2019. This is not only a very nice addition to our P&L, it's also extremely important in terms of cross-promotion for our other services. Just as an example, RIX, our main station, reaches out to 1.1 million listeners every day. Imagine what we can do with that in terms of promoting our other services and our great content.
To win in this world, it's also very important to embrace and not fight against the future. We've done this for a long time. You've already heard the strategy behind Viafree and Viaplay and how we're constantly using Viafree to upsell to Viaplay. What's unique in Sweden is that we introduced mandatory login on Viafree last year, and we now have 1 million registered users on Viafree that we can target in an efficient way. Of course, you use the same login details for both. In Sweden, we've also launched broadband TV for exactly the same reason why we once launched Viafree and Viaplay. Namely, to be able to migrate our customers over to a more future-proof platform. We're doing broadband TV in a very asset-light way, but I'm proud to say that we now have nearly 120,000 broadband TV customers.
Another way in which we are investing in our future is, of course, in our people. I would like to start by talking a bit about our management team in Sweden. We have an extremely well-integrated management team. This is important because this is why we are able to make fast decisions. This is why we can shift around content to different platforms depending on where we see the market is heading. This is also why we are able to allocate our cross-promotion inventory in the most efficient way. This may sound easy, believe me, it's not. We've been working towards this for a really long time. It takes time, experience, common understanding. It takes a lot of effort to get everyone aligned towards the same goal. I'm proud to say we're finally there. That's why we managed to drive successful results last year.
That's also why we're going to continue to be efficient in the future. In addition to our management, we really are attracting the best talent in the market. Anders talked a lot about how much time and effort we have spent in creating strong corporate values and establishing a company that people want to work for. We really have succeeded. If you want to work within media today, Nent really is the company to be working for. I started my career in management consultancy. I've seen many different companies. I can honestly say that I have never met so many ambitious and dedicated people as I have at Nent. I've been thinking about this quite a lot. I am pretty sure it comes down to passion.
People working at NENT are passionate about our products, and that's also why they are willing to put in that little bit of extra effort to make the company successful. Personally, I think that this passion and dedication is going to be our main differentiator that continues to drive our business into future success. You know heard me talking a lot about our ecosystem and how we're using this to really drive value. I would also like to show some practical examples of what it can look like when we really are playing the full piano. I'm going to start by something a little bit nostalgic, namely the IIHF World Championship. This is a right that was once acquired to really push TV3 back in 1989. We broadcasted the event for 23 years.
When we managed to win it back and show it on TV3 again, where it belongs, last year, we didn't want to disappoint anyone. Here is a little bit of a snapshot of what it looked like. As I said before, sports is not cheap. For us to get good return on this investment, we of course, needed to use our full ecosystem. This is how we did it. We had 35 people on site in Copenhagen to deliver fantastic productions. We sent more than 200 live hours. We used TV3 for the big games. We used TV10 for the smaller games.
Here we also had a great collaboration with Aftonbladet to get even bigger reach. How did it go? Yes, we reached 3.5 million viewers during the final. TV3 set a new all-time channel record in terms of share viewing. Sweden won. We got great return on our investment. Leaving sports, going into something a little bit more serious, I also wanted to give you an example of what difference really good quality content can make, also how we're using our linear channels to really push streaming. To show you this, I'm going to use the Crime Thursdays that we introduced on TV3 last fall as my example. Here is again a short summary of what it can look like. To succeed in the linear world is not just about picking the right content.
You also need to create the right flow. What we did here is we created a whole crime evening just packed with crime. This had a huge impact on TV3. We actually increased the slot with 80% compared to the same period the previous year. It also had a huge impact on the rest of our ecosystem, where we have actually managed to build a whole franchise around crime. I'll give you some examples. The main host is also producing a crime podcast that has been extremely successful. He's also, of course, a reoccurring guest in our biggest morning show in radio, where he is the crime expert. On Viafree, we are producing tons of extra material and regular updates in between the weekly shows to see what's going on in the different cases.
On Viaplay, we are building a library of documentaries to really become the home of documentaries in the Nordic. I also said I was going to explain how we are using linear to drive streaming, and this is what we did here between TV3 and Viaplay. The documentaries that we showed on TV3 are always published one week ahead on Viaplay, meaning we can always push for the next episode when we are showing the documentary on TV3. This has had a fantastic impact, and the best example is one of our main cases, which was a two-episode documentary. When we showed the first episode, the second was already out on Viaplay. Of course, we kept on pushing.
If you want to see the continuation, please go on to Viaplay." When we then look at our Viaplay figures, we can see something very strange that does not happen very often, that the second episode has significantly higher viewing than the first. Meaning a lot of people watched the first documentary on TV3. They could not wait a whole week to see the second, so they went into Viaplay to see what happened, and we managed to get a new premium subscriber. A very good example of why it is also important to be strong in the linear world to drive streaming. Lastly, my last example, I would like to show how our ecosystem works in terms of actual money and how we make return on our investment. I am using a reality show, "Parneviks," as my example.
Here, if we start with linear viewing, you can see that we are losing viewers on our linear channel. This is completely aligned with strategy. We are actually declining a little bit faster than the overall market on linear, deliberately, since we are pushing towards streaming. If we look at our streaming viewing figures, we increased streaming by 37%. The good news with streaming is that here we can also produce extra material. For "Parneviks," we are doing more with the children and additional content targeted to the younger audience. If we add the two together, what does it look like in terms of money? We are increasing our revenue on the show with 38%, meaning it looks like we have a bright future.
To sum up, we have been extremely successful in Sweden, and I am very confident that we are going to continue to be successful also in the future. The main reasons are we have an extremely strong ecosystem where we are constantly leveraging our multiple platforms and driving synergies. This is why we are able to invest in the best content. This is also why we are able to continue to invest in our products to make sure our streaming and broadcasting services are best in class. Personally, I am extremely excited to bring on the future challenges with the best team in the market. Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much, Filippa.
Thank you.
We're running ahead of schedule, which is fantastic at this time, although we do have some catch up on some questions for later. For some bizarre reason, it's always the case that finance comes last on these occasions. I never understand why, particularly when you have someone, a showman of the quality of Mr. Catrina to come on stage. Please welcome Gabriel, our CFO, onto stage. Thank you.
Thank you.
That is yours.
Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Hope you have been enjoying the afternoon so far. I'm Gabriel, CFO of NENT Group. Been CFO since July last year. For the past five years, I've been leading the transformation of what it is NENT today, and very excited about the journey that we have ahead of us. I will talk a little bit about how we have been creating value in the past, but especially how we're going to create value in the future for our shareholders. Before I start, there's a few key points that I want you to take with you today. The first one is that we are a growth business with a big value opportunity ahead of us. This is not about optimizing and maximizing profitability. We believe that we can drive value through growing the business more than anything.
The second point is that we have a clear and proven value creation model based on a very clear strategy. This includes a very disciplined way in how we allocate our capital and how we think about remunerating our shareholders. We have a strong track record already on delivering financial results. Also, as we see our business going forward and we become much more of a subscription-based business, we see a lot more predictability, and especially as we scale our streaming business. Finally, that we here, the people presenting in front of you today, but the entire management team and NENT Group, is aligned and focused on delivering shareholder value, and that is very important. We heard a lot about us being pioneers with streaming in the past, and that we started early on with this transformation.
This value creation model, the way that we create value, that we have been able to create value over time, it's been built over a long time. I think the main event, I think it was back in 2014 when we started looking at the consumer trends and we saw where value was going, and we made a proactive decision to really transform the business. We were the first ones in our industry to do that, the first one by far, compared to any other European broadcaster. What did that mean for us? It meant that, obviously, as Jakob was talking about, we started thinking differently about the way that we bought content, but to really transform the way that we run the business. We launched a cost program.
It was a SEK 1 billion program back then, SEK 600 million of run rate cost savings on OpEx, which we delivered in 2017. That has allowed us to become much more efficient in how we run our operations. It freed up a lot of capital for us to be able to make all these content investments and also to make all the tech investments. We internalized a lot of the development. We launched a new platform so we can develop technology in a much cheaper way and then have more control of that development. We also freed up money to be able to start this originals journey. This has made us come to the point where we are today, where we have a scale position already in streaming. We've done this in a profitable way.
As you can see from the results that we have delivered the last three years, we have grown net sales by 6% and the segment profit for both of our segments by 9%. If you look at the way that we are going to disclose the business now going forward, look at our advertising revenues, which includes linear television advertising video on demand, and our radio advertising, grown by 5%. Especially if you look at our subscription business, which includes all of the distribution business, third-party networks, Viaplay direct-to-consumer, and Viaplay, we've grown more than 8% over the last three years. With a stable studio business over the last three years, we've been able to deliver this profitable growth.
At the same time that we invested in the business, at the same time that we invested into content, thanks to that proactive transformation of taking cost out, not being afraid of disrupting ourselves, we've been able to do this transformation, scale streaming, deliver this result. 2018 was no exception. Grew net sales by 6.5%. We grew our segment revenue by 5.5%. As a group, 3.3%. We managed some decline that we saw in our studio business as the mix shifted to our more scripted content, with those productions being more delayed in terms of the way that they get confirmed. Broadcasting and streaming grew by 7%. 4.5% of that was organic growth in our broadcasting and streaming business. Overall, very strong result in 2018, very much in line with our expectations and what we were set to do.
How was this possible? You used to think about these things in the way that we have been creating value, that way we think about creating value going forward as well. Obviously, we had very good performance in broadcasting, television, managed the structural decline that we have seen in our legacy platforms on paid TV, free TV, price increases, invested in the product, focusing really on efficiency in order to get as much value as possible in order to fuel the growth in streaming. Obviously, the growth and the performance has been driven by streaming scale, both in terms of Viaplay, as you heard from Anders, the growth, especially around Viaplay. The reason why we've been able to deliver good results is this unique and diversified business model that you heard about.
It's not just about being able to monetize the content in a different way across different platforms. We are a Nordic player. We have multiple platforms, multiple ways to monetize the content. We have much more efficient way to run operations. We operate across multiple countries. There's a resilience in the model. When one area goes down, there's always an area that can compensate, and that's why we've been able to manage this steady growth, even though we've seen some difficulties in some products in some markets. Everything also has been underpinned by a very disciplined way in how we think about where we allocate our money and where we don't allocate our money, and how we invest. I'll spend a little bit of time talking about this capital allocation model and how we think about creating value.
We have defined a balanced approach that allows us to both be able to invest in the business to drive growth, because we believe that's how we're going to generate value. At the same time, being able to remunerate the investors in an attractive way through paying dividends in the process. At the same time, being able to strengthen our financial position in terms of the leverage that we will have at listing in order to have that flexibility to continue to invest and also to weather any changes in the market that we may see. Everything is based on a very clear strategy about growing in streaming. Everything is evaluated through those lenses. It sets the priority for investments. We have a very strict governance how we think about investments. Everything has to have a return.
We will never invest in anything when we don't see the ROI. We will do long-term strategic investments. If we don't see the returns, we will say no. We will also say no to investment opportunities where we see very high returns but are not in line with that strategy. We're going to be very focused on driving our streaming growth and everything that supports that going forward. You should expect us to prioritize organic investments in growing the business over anything else. As we drive scale, we drive more value. When we think about M&A, we think about only bolt-on acquisitions, maybe on the content area that can fuel that story, streaming story. You're not going to see us do major M&A. It's going to be focused on organic growth investments.
When it comes to larger M&A, we will evaluate those opportunities on its own merits. Think about going forward, if big opportunities for M&A come, we will evaluate those. We will be focusing on consolidation rather than expansion in the market. We are focused on the Nordics and on organic investments on growing the business, especially in streaming. Why streaming? Anders talked a lot about how big of an opportunity this is. Obviously, it is a significant volume opportunity ahead of us. It provides us with recurring cash flows and greater earnings visibility as we grow, less macro sensitive compared to advertising. It costs actually, Anders, less than a good pizza, not more than a good pizza. You can argue that in tough times, people consume more entertainment at home than outside of the home.
You might see an upside if there is a downturn around the corner. There is something that is very unique to us, because you could argue that all of this is relevant for anyone operating in this market. What is unique to us is that we have all the elements in place. We started this very early on. We have made the tech investments. We have the content. We buy content in a different way. We have higher operational leverage than all the other players because of the scale position that we have. We get more for every customer that we add than anyone else. If you look at just the numbers from the subscription level that we have today, we have a 10x opportunity to reach all the Nordic households.
If you just look at the people that are already used to consuming these services, which should be easier to sell to them, we have a 4x opportunity. If you think about what is the real potential ahead of us, if you want to model that. This is why for us, focusing on volume growth is important. Let me talk to you about how do we drive value within streaming. We have grown the business the last couple of years through investments into content and in the user experience. That has resulted in an increased number of subscribers and also that the churn has gone down. As the customers stay longer in the platform and the customer base become older, obviously churn goes down even more.
If you look at our basic package, movies and TV series package, churn is down 8% from 16 to 18. On the sports package, where we get most of the value, it is down 20%. This is also a merit of all the investments that we have done in the sports portfolio that are really paying off, because people are coming into the platforms for the big sports rights, but they are staying because we have such a broad offering. As our business scales and we get more customers, churn goes down. When churn goes down, average customer lifetime goes up. When average customer lifetime goes up, the contribution per customer goes up. If you look at our basic package, average lifetime, last two years, up by 9%, sports 25% up.
The contribution, because those customers stay longer, 77% more value that we get from a basic subscriber and 45% more value that we get from a premium subscriber on a much higher ARPU. That is why volume for us is important. Since we have this operational leverage where we have a very controlled cost on the content side, because of how we structure these deals, because we have a fairly fixed cost that is much more efficient because of this transformation that we did, the more we add customers, the lower the churn, the higher the lifetime, the more value. We can invest in more content, we get more customers in, over time, this is going to lead to very high profitability in the future.
This is why we create more value by scaling streaming, this is why we're going to focus on volume growth more than anything. Volume growth is not just important for our streaming business. It is important because we can manage any structural decline on any of our traditional products. We have a positive effect by greater volume growth. If you look at today, our Viaplay customers represent around 60% of the base. We grew Viaplay by 320,000 customers last 2 years. At the same time, we lost net 40,000 Viasat direct to consumer. We have gained almost eight customers on Viaplay for each customer that we lost on Viasat direct to consumer. This has been a positive equation for us. As long as we can grow much faster and a much faster pace our Viaplay customer base, we can manage any structural decline.
Obviously, we will continue to invest, and we have invested a lot on Viasat to be able to keep those customers longer. You have seen, the ones that have been following the business for a while, that churn levels have gone down on DTH. Those customers provide a lot of value. We have quite a stable third-party business. Again, as long as we can convert much faster new Viaplay customers and we can scale that business, we can manage any structural decline that we can see ahead of us. This is why, again, the focus is going to be around volume and volume and volume going forward. Where are we going to prioritize our investments in order to drive streaming growth? No secret. Priority number 1 is going to be around content.
Better content, also wider content, because if we want to reach a wider audience, we need to cater to those needs. We're going to make more investments into content. We're going to continue to invest in product and technology, especially when it comes to the user experience, personalization, content discovery, because that helps us to keep the customers longer in the platform, and that reduces the churn over time, increases the lifetime, and we get more value for those customers. The third element is going to be around distribution. I will spend a little bit of time on each one of these. Content. Heard a lot about originals. Still, we will continue to invest with a balanced mix of investment into sports, acquire content Local productions, as we heard from Filippa, that drives value, but especially when it comes to originals.
Sports, it's a big value driver in Viaplay. You saw the contribution that we get for each Viaplay premium customer. It drives value in our distribution business with our partners. It drives value on Viasat. It drives value on free TV. We get a lot out of those investments. We will continue to keep our leadership in sports, so you should expect us to continue to invest. We have secured already the portfolio going forward, and we will continue to defend the position that we have. Acquired content, big value driver, brings people into the platform, the movies, the series, keeps them into the platform. We will continue to invest, as we heard from Jakob.
The originals, I think that there's one other element from what we heard so far when it comes to the originals, it is that we can reduce our cost and also eventually our currency exposure, especially when we produce those originals in the Nordics in local currency, then we produce them with our own production company. Yes, they are expensive productions, but we will get better benefits than trying to bid for content versus producing originals. We will reduce the dependency over external content over time and avoid any price inflation. This is something that the studios understands very well.
When we started this journey about originals, you can see them, "Okay, now you're going to produce your own content and not buy from us." No, it's not about that, but it gives us a hedge also when it comes to those investments. Obviously, there's a downside of investing in originals. As Jakob said, it takes anywhere from one year up to two years since we start investing in development until we put the content in the platform. Obviously, we need to front-load those cash flows to be able to produce. You've seen some of the negative trends from working capital, but that is a strategic investment in working capital because it generates value that we will tie more capital into doing these originals. We see the returns, and we will continue with that.
When it comes to technology, I think we heard about it, that we have come very far. We have 300 in-house product data and technology engineers. We used to source a lot of the developing externally. Now we have everything in-house. It's cheaper. We can control. We can manage the resources, so we can continue to maintain the platform and develop new functionality in a much more efficient and controlled way. That team has increased by 23% the last two years. I think we have reached a level of investment that is okay for the growth that we need to serve in the Nordics, but we can scale this platform globally tomorrow if we wanted to. We can go to any market in the world with the platform. It's ready.
If you think about how much investments we have made the last four years, look at our tech cost, 2015 to 2018, we have invested around SEK 3 billion. It's a lot of money. You can see it in two ways. We have made the investments already. We don't have to go through the journey which many broadcasters have to go through now. We're probably four, five, or even more years away. There's a flip side of this. You can actually say, "Wait a minute, you've invested only SEK 3 billion?" If you compare ourselves to the global streamers, we have been quite efficient on developing a platform that can benchmark and outperform any of the global streaming platforms, especially when it comes to live content. It's expensive and difficult to deliver 13,000 live events per year and 50,000 live hours.
It has to work, and it has to work in time when you're watching the Champions League final. We are outperforming, especially when it comes to what the consumers are saying, global streaming platforms, and definitely the locals. The third element, very important, we will continue to invest in customer acquisition as we have in the past, direct acquisition of customers. We will continue to invest in marketing, the brand of the product, but also in marketing the content. As you will see that we will increase not just investing in marketing the products, but the content is important to be marketed for people to not just get into the platform, but also existing users to know what new content is coming on board. Also, we will leverage this cross-promotion power that we have.
We can also market the products and the content in a much more efficient way by leveraging our free TV channels, our radio channels, bringing in talent into the radio shows in the morning to promote the products. We will do that in a more efficient way. The new thing is around distribution partnerships. Anders mentioned that in his presentation. We will get closer to our traditional distribution partners to make sure that we get wider distribution of Viaplay. We will look into new partnerships, retailers, digital services, and we will make those investments in the form of sharing some of those revenues to make sure that we get wider distribution. That's how we will invest. You should expect us to continue to invest in growth, especially to drive the volume, and prioritize that over the next few years over higher profitability.
Because we believe that growth increases enterprise value. It's not about maximizing for profitability. That's what we believe. Shareholders and we as a company, we create more value if we focus on that. Of course, we are committed to profitable growth. Let me show you a little bit of how we see the outlook for the business going forward. We are set up for continued profitable growth. That will come in two forms. Organic growth and also higher operating income. We have said, both in our information brochure and our prospectus, that we don't give specific financial targets. If you look at the history of our performance, that is probably a testament of what you should expect going forward. We have grown on average organically with 5% the last three years.
We had an operating margin for the segments of around 10%-11%. You can maybe reference that in order to see what you should expect going forward. Positive segment [elevate] going forward. Obviously, in 2019, we will have the full effect of being a standalone company and a separate listed company. When you look at the operating income for the group, you should see profitable growth from 2020 or beyond 2019. Obviously we are buying a lot of content in foreign currency, especially US dollar. We see some negative impact from that. We have seen the US dollar strengthen against the SEK the last six months, and especially the last few days. On the back of some interesting news from their European friends.
I think we have guided in the past for 2019 around SEK 100 million impact. We feel confident that we can manage that and still deliver the profitable growth that we are set to deliver. Why do I feel confident that we can deliver that? If you look at the way that we disclose the business and where the revenue streams are going to come from, just looking at advertising, obviously streaming is going to be delivering the growth. If you look at advertising, we see obviously structural decline in linear television. The inventory loss that we see there is not fully compensated for the viewership that we get on advertising video on demand. We've been able to increase prices. We see more growth on Viafree on advertising video on demand.
There's a pricing power in terms of those digital products because we can do much more targeted campaigns. With a stable Norwegian radio business and a growing Swedish business, we see a neutral to positive outlook when it comes to our advertising revenues going forward. When it comes to subscription, on the volume side, we're growing Viaplay faster. We plan to do that even further, manage any decline that we can see in our direct-to-consumer products on Viasat. On the pricing side, stable distribution business going forward, stable third-party business going forward. Some pricing power on the back of new content launches on Viasat. Definitely when it comes to Viaplay, on the premium segment, we have some pricing power.
On the basic package, since we're going to be focusing on volume, we're going to follow the market. As we scale, we will have the opportunity to start doing some tiering and then we will definitely have some pricing power. Since the focus is on volume, we will follow the market on that. Overall, positive outlook. If we combine that with studios, there's a positive mix as we see the business right now when it comes to a stable non-scripted segment. High growth on the volume side on scripted, on the back of local demand, but also international demand that we see and that we will pursue. With a neutral pricing outlook, we see a positive development. This gives me the confidence that we can continue to scale streaming business and being able to deliver this profitable growth.
I'll let you look at the slide since it's a lot of information. I said at the beginning that we have established a really balanced way that allows us to both invest in growing the business, because that's where we're going to generate most of the value. At the same time, being able to deliver attractive returns to our shareholders, also being able to build more flexibility into our balance sheet to be able to make additional investments or weather any changes in the market. This is why our dividend policy has been set to reflect this. 30%-50% of adjusted net income. We are proposing to already pay dividends this year, SEK 6.5 per share, subject to AGM approval.
We want to do that expansively. We start with a good level to be able to deliver an expansive dividend policy. At the same time, we feel confident even though we're taking SEK 3.9 billion, roughly, of debt as a listed company, we can manage to continue to invest in the business, and on the back of profit growth and the cash flow generation, being able to deliver that to have this flexibility. At listing, we will be within the policy, even though we take this level of debt. Also accounting for the impact of the leases. We have SEK 600 million net effect, SEK 850 million of gross effect. Since we sublease some of our buildings, we see that.
As I mentioned earlier, working capital, we continue to do the strategic investments to be able to do this original, especially when we do those productions with our own studios. Sometimes with the external studios, they secure the financing. When we do it with our own studios, we have to finance those studios ourselves. I think you've seen, in the prospectus, the level of change in working capital in 2018. That's a fair assumption of what you could expect going forward. 2017 was an odd year. 2016 was more in line with what you should expect. I think it was SEK 380 million or SEK 400 million. Combination of sports investments and these original investments. When it comes to capital expenditures, all the tech investments we take on the OpEx line. You should see asset-light model when it comes to CapEx going forward.
To summarize, we have a clear value creation strategy around streaming on the back of a significant market opportunity and on the back of a stronger starting position with a 25% market share, which is much stronger than anyone else in the Nordic market on the local level. It is backed by a solid capital allocation approach on how much we invest, how we remunerate investors. We are set to drive sustainable profit growth and provide attractive and expansive dividends to our shareholders. That is our investor proposition. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much, Gabriel. Just before I hand over to Anders for his concluding remarks, thank you all for your time. We've had 150 people in the room. We've had another 150 people who aren't in the room, who've been streaming this and watching it. Thank you very much for your time today. This is the first of what will be many NENT capital market days. It's been a great pleasure to be here with you, and I'll now hand you to Anders for his concluding remarks.
Thank you, Matthew. Let me, from the bottom of my heart, extend my thanks as well. To see all of you here today, at some sort of climax of a journey that we have been on, leading now up to the upcoming listing on March 28th is fantastic. The interest you show in us is truly important and heartwarming for us, so thank you very much for that. I hope that we have established a good understanding of what kind of business it is that we are building. The fantastic legacy that we have taken from the 30-plus MTG years and molded into something new. We're transforming ourselves, reinventing ourselves, almost on a daily basis. We have a very dedicated strategy now, a very focused execution of that strategy. I think, putting myself on your side, this is a fairly clear investor proposition. Yes, there will be challenges.
Yes, things will happen that we haven't foreseen. Throughout my career, I've always worked with under the assumption that something will hit the fan that you didn't expect. Make sure you're ready for it. That's what we have been doing. Over these past nine consecutive quarters of profitable growth, there has been challenges that have popped up in the last minute, literally sometimes in the last minute, Christmas Eve. "Yeah, by the way, I'm downgrading." They say, "Okay, fine." That's the way it is. You have to have a catalog of things to work with to be sustainable. You cannot just go out there and go to the shareholders and say, "Yeah, sorry what we said, but something came up and we didn't." You cannot do that.
You have to be mindful about making sure that you deal with and roll with the punches as they come. That's the kind of company we are. I think your question was brilliant. There is 11 million households that haven't chosen Viaplay yet. It's perfect. That's a fantastic starting point. We probably haven't communicated well enough with the majority of them, and the majority of them don't even know that they want streaming yet. They will. The same way we didn't know back in the '50s that we all wanted TV because it was a damn ugly thing to put in your living room, and it was expensive. Back then they said, "Well, TV will probably reach a penetration around 38%-40%. The rest of people don't want to watch TV." That's actually from back then. That didn't hold true.
The natural extension of this is that we're going to stream everything that is streamable, and we're going to use technology in completely new ways. At the end of the day, it is the proposition, it's the content, it's the sort of things you talk about at the coffee machine, with your colleagues, with your family. That creates a glue. That glue, that's what we're all about. Again, thank you very much. I don't know, but I hope that we have answered all the questions that you may have. We are available straight after here. We're available all the way up to the listing to take any questions that you may have. Thanks a lot for your time.