Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT) and Telenor have announced the completion on schedule of the combination of their Viasat Consumer and Canal Digital arms respectively, and said they have named the joint venture Allente. The Viasat Consumer satellite pay-TV and IPTV operations along with the Canal Digital satellite pay-TV business will be available to 1.2 million customers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.
NENT and Allente have entered a long-term agreement to make Viaplay available to the vast majority of Allente’s subscribers eventually. NENT said 476,000 Viasat subscribers were already paying for Viaplay subscriptions at the end of March, and will be added to Viaplay’s subscriber base in future. Canal Digital first began making Viaplay available to its customers in Q1 2020, so there is a growth opportunity for Viaplay in the Canal Digital base.
Another 364,000 third party network subscribers had Viaplay as part of their pay-TV packages at the end of March, and they will be added to Viaplay’s subscriber base in future. On this basis, NENT Group would have had 2.51 million paying Viaplay subscribers at the end of March. Prior to its Q2 results in July, NENT will announce a new disclosure structure to reflect the shape of the group after the closing of this transaction.
NENT CEO Anders Jensen said there is an ambition for of 400,000 net new Viaplay subscribers in 2020, with close to 3 million paying subscribers in the Nordic region by the end of the year.
Viasat Consumer had SEK 2.92 billion net sales in 2019 with EBITDA of SEK 485 million generated by 489,000 subscribers. Canal Digital had SEK 4.55 billion net sales last year with SEK 746 million in EBITDA generated by 737,000 customers.
Allente has 400 employees in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland and will be run from headquarters in Stockholm and Oslo. NENT and Telenor each own 50 percent of the shares in the venture. Allente will be financed by external debt and will pay its distributable earnings to its owners in the form of regular dividends.
Allente will operate at arm’s length from its owners, as an open platform supplying output from several providers. Allente will distribute NENT Group's Viaplay streaming service, Viasat pay-TV channels under the brand V from June, and its free-TV channels.
