Norway’s public broadcaster is planning regular HD programmes in time for the Winter Olympics that will be held in Vancouver, Canada from February 12 – 28, 2010.
It is anticipated that by the autumn a number of locally originated dramas will also be distributed in the format. Already series such as the popular Himmelblå (Blue Sky) have been produced in HD.
NRK’s first foray into HD came with the Beijing Olympics when the bandwidth assigned to NRK1 and NRK2 was combined to allow distribution of a single HD channel on the country’s MPEG-4 DTT system.
So far Norway’s only one of Norway’s Big 5 TV channels to develop a dedicated HD channel has been TVNorge and Sweden’s SVT the sole public broadcaster with a regular HD service.
There are a total of 382,000 HD receivers in the Nordic market.
