What goes on in the rest of the world - Swedish Edition

We received a great email from Jonas who provides us a glimpse of the state of Internet, HDTV, and Home entertainment in the country of Sweden. If you live outside teh US and want to do teh same please send your email to us at hdtvpodcast@mac.com.

Sweden is partly known for The Pirate Bay, a search engine for bittorrents that was started by three Swedish guys. In the old times of TPB, Swedes completed one million downloads a month of copyrighted material. It is nowadays punishable by law to share and download files , thanks to intensive lobbying from the record labels and movie studios.

This was in part due to our cheap access to broadband. A typical customer living in a one-family house can get uncapped ADSL starting at 21 USD/month for 0,5 MBit and i pay 43 USD/month for 24 Mbit uncapped (but i only get 14 Mbit as the nearest station is a couple of kms away). You can get a gigabit connection in some cities for 140 USD/month. If you live in an apartment, you can get ADLS of course and all cable operators offer triple play. The apartment i left in the city some years back was just getting 100 Mbit ethernet installed, costing 28 USD/month. I think overall these prices are lower than what you get in the US?

High speed, 3G mobile internet access is available almost everywhere. I normally get 1-4 Mbit downstream on the iPhone and I can count on one hand the number of times that i was not able to connect to the Internet here. We have 4 cellular networks för 3G and dozens of providers. We have just started getting LTE (Long Term Evolution or 4G). After all, Ericsson is a Swedish company... The LTE network offers 20-80 Mbit and is accessed with USB modems, with a potential of 100 Mbit downstream. Initial cost is $80 Should be interesting times here in a few years...

The iPhone was widely adopted here, with 500.000 units sold for a population of only 9 million.

So, we are among the top countries world wide for Internet penetration and file sharing users used to make up a large proportion of the total Internet traffic in Sweden. This is lower now, after the new laws. All domestic TV networks offer select content on their web sites, mostly free. My family watches 50% TV on a TV and 50% on a computer screen over IP... Some also have iPhone versions so i sometimes watch shows on my iPhone in bed or on my commute. We have 5 web based services for movie streaming and downloads, a typical rental is 5 USD but since most homes do not have a computer hooked up to the TV, these services are not so used. A new provider, Voddler, has adopted an ad based service offering movies and TV shows with very good picture quality but the selection is really bleak for now. A brick and mortar rental of a blockbuster Bluray is $5.75 . Nowadays we get the movies about the same time as you guys, we used to trail a few months behind. We also have a few Netflicks look alikes but it has not really caught on here. 2 movies out and unlimited movies per month is $26. Last Bluray for me Moon (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/), ok but the plot twist came too early and from then it was mostly transport.

All TV is digital, we made the transition gradually by area and it was completed in October 2007. We have adopted the DVB standard (Digital Video Broadcast). It comes in several flavours, for satellite, terrestrial and cable. We had PAL  before so the increase in picture quality was not dramatic, it was more about efficient broadcasting and release of frequency bands. Some content was also in widescreen even before the transition to digital. No terrestrial content is HD yet but we are making the transition to MPEG-4 now (which is forcing people to by new set top boxes, three years after having to buy one for MPEG-2 whiuch is upsetting some subscribers). Most content is accessed with a separate box, only few TVs sold have them built in and given the rate of updates to the hardware required for decoding, the general advice is to go for the separate box.

We have 2 satellite providers, CanalDigital and Viasat and both offer SD and HD broadcasts. I have CanalDigital and an almost complete package gives me 65 SD channels, 13 HD channels (most are also among the 65 in SD), costing $66. We get ESPN HD, BBC HD, Rush HD, two movie and two sports channels in HD, Discovery HD, National Geographic HD, History Channel HD, Animal Planet HD and some locals as well. DVRs are not widely adopted here, i think it is a cost issue as you pay an upfront fee. I have no numbers on HD content adoption but i must say that SD over DVB can look really good and many (most?) people can't appreciate the difference . Main sporting events have been key drivers to push the format but again, most people don't can't get it or don't think it is worth the extra money. We have one provider offering TV channels over ADSL but no HD yet in that distribution format. We cant't get many of the cool services you describe on the show

Everyone (except my parents) have flat panel displays. A mid-tier 42 inch is in the $670-$1000 range and the good ones, the ones i would consider is about $2.000. We mostly get the same brands you talk about on the show, except Vizio and some of the other low end brands. Samsung took a big chunk of the market, with Panasonic, LG and Sony being other main brands sold by the big chains.

As for my own setup in my suburban house near Stockholm, i have a dedicated home theatre with a 7.1 B&W/Velodyne setup with Marantz as the power source, a PS3 and a Samsung DLP shooting a 130 inch picture. I have a 1 TB QNAP NAS with all my content that i access from a PS3 or any of the household's four laptops. The wireless network works suprisingly well, maybe thanks to compression (1 GB MPEG-4 DVD backups), no HD content yet. I use a two Harmony (895?) and am very happy that even my four year old son can fire up a movie (and maybe more importantly, turn it off when he is done, the bulbs on those projeectors are really expensive..). And my wife was happy that we could hide the electronics in a cabinet under the TV after having set up the radio receiver of the Harmony. I look forward to the addition of an iPad and i expect to be 50% happy and 50% not thrilled. The iPad should be launched here in the summer and even if i were to get a US bound travelling friend to pick one up, the App Store is closed for us. And no micro SIMs are offered yet.

It is a sunny day outside after a really long winter with three months straight of snow on the ground. We haven't had that in many years. It is now 53 degrees F and am just about ready for some spring!

Thanks for a always entertaining show, you are a part of the weekly routine!
/Jonas