Under the pact between Telia-owned C More and the foreign language streaming specialist Walter Presents, an initial line-up of eight first-run and exclusive TV shows covering 80 hours of programming, will be available across Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

Those include the Dutch psycho thriller The Blood Pact, Italian crime thrillers Thou Shalt Not Kill and Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone, French crime dramas Vanished by the Lake and The Other Mother, as well as the Belgian political action thriller Blackout.

The slate will then grow to 500 hours over two years, through regular fortnightly title premieres.

“We are thrilled about launching Walter Presents on our streaming platform, providing our customers with high quality drama from all over the world. It’s the perfect complement to our Nordic C More original series,“ said Karin Lindström, acting Head of Acquisitions at C More, adding: “We see a growing interest in international and non-English-speaking drama, and I believe this is an opportunity for our audience to find some new favourites they might have never heard of otherwise!”

Underlying the high volume of content on the market, Lindström’s colleague Anna Chrona, Head of C More OTT said “the challenge for today’s users isn’t to find something to watch, but to find the gems that you didn’t know you were looking for.”

“Almost all digital services are using algorithm-driven recommendation systems to push specific titles to the user. With Walter Presents, we are the first streaming platform in the Nordics to bring a curated collection of hand-picked drama titles to our audience. It’s like having a personal shopper but for high-quality drama!”, Chrona stressed.

For Walter Presents, launched in the UK in 2016 by Jason Thorp, Walter Iuzzolino and Jo McGrath, the deal with C More announced this morning, marks a new step in its global roll out, and brings the brand to 13 territories, via local partners. “Scandinavia has been at the forefront of the global drama revolution and made the rest of the world fall in love with premium subtitled drama,” stressed Iuzzolino, an early buyer of Nordic drama. “In just a handful of years, that cultural revolution has truly come full circle, and giant global audiences are now enjoying series made all over the world in record numbers. So this is the perfect time to thank Scandinavia for changing our understanding and appreciation of international television, by bringing to their audiences some of the most compelling and exciting series produced across Europe and beyond,” he stated.

Among the latest Nordic TV series available on Walter Presents in the UK via Channel 4 and/or its AVOD service All4, are the Swedish shows The Inner Circle, Box 21, Denmark’s When the Dust Settles, Cry Wolf, Deliver Us and Finland’s Bullets.

Walter Presents’ tight connection with the Nordics also extends to the remake market, through Eagle Eye Drama, production outfit set up in 2019 by the group’s three founding members to create English language versions of popular foreign language shows. The first Eagle Eye production was Before We Die, UK version of SVT’s original crime drama Innan vi dör.

Asked by nordicfilmandtvnews.com if the partnership with Walter Presents could eventually lead to co-productions or co-financing of upcoming Nordic TV shows, Piodor Gustafsson, Head of Scripted Content for TV4 Media said: “I believe this [partnership] can lead to more, and it's very exciting to get access to curated content from other parts of the world we normally wouldn't commission or acquire.”