How Amedia uses Flowplayer to grow its online subscription base

However, in early 2014, Amedia was just like any other newspaper group, with most revenues coming from the offline media. As a consequence, all the growth figures were not looking very good.

In April 2014, they made a company-wide decision to start converting all their existing 480,000 print subscribers to digital customers
. Because that's the only sane thing you can do to survive.

The first critical insight was that digital ad income is unable to finance local journalism. So the only valid business model is to provide high-quality content as a digital subscription. Or as they put it: "Turning journalism into a business model."

Amedia found a strong correlation between visit frequency and purchase rate. That is: the more people come back to the site, the more they buy. And the more they focus on the content, the more people come back consuming it.

The more people focus on the content, the more they come back, and the more likely they buy.

They made a two-phase plan: start with the existing customers and then move on to acquiring new online audiences. With systematic testing, they found a sweet spot: low churn and a high price point.

They now have a firm position on the market.

Norway’s largest live broadcaster

Amedia has the exclusive rights to stream live video from Norwegian 2nd division football. Using this advantage, they started broadcasting live video on their online newspapers.

<img alt="" class="bigger" src="/user/pages/04.blog/11.how-amedia-uses-flowplayer/shooting-soccer-big.jpg" /title="A typical setup is still mainly one camera, one photographer and one commentator – who also does the graphics and replays. And very often an umbrella."><figcaption>A typical setup is still mainly one camera, one photographer and one commentator – who also does the graphics and replays. And very often an umbrella.</figcaption>

By connecting with the local fans, they eventually became Norway's largest producer of live sports in the process.

• In 2016, they were Norway’s largest producer of live football 347 local matches.
• In 2017, they produced no less than 1,500 matches.
• In 2018, they broadcasted 3000 sports events,
• In 2019 they broadcasted 5000 sports events,
• In the first four months of 2019, they aired 1000 games.
• This year they we’re headed for a new all time high in number of streams before the corona lockdown halted all sporting events in mid March.

But why live-streaming? Because highly targeted live-events sell more than traditional content.

Using Flowplayer as the nerve center

On the three-year-journey to transform Amedia to a digital subscription business, Flowplayer has been the central hub for all the online video activity.

All their video-, live-streaming, and online advertising operations are managed in Flowplayer. By having a central solution, the whole eco-system is more natural to work with.

We are pleased to outsource live-streaming for Flowplayer, because it's almost impossible at this scale. We can focus on journalism, which we do best.

<img alt="Tord Selmer-Nedrelid" src="/user/pages/04.blog/11.how-amedia-uses-flowplayer/tord.jpg" /title="Tord Selmer-Nedrelid / Head of Video at Amedia"><figcaption>Tord Selmer-Nedrelid / Head of Video at Amedia</figcaption>

Next step

Flowplayer has always been in very close contact with Amedia. This has improved our product and service significantly. Many of the features on our product can be rooted back to a request from Amedia. Particularly the live-streaming features due to their unique needs and scalability requirements. We expect to do even more greatness together with them in the future.