Latest news with #Erhag
Hamilton Spectator
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Livestream of moose migrating to summer pastures that had millions hooked ends
STOCKHOLM (AP) — The seventh season of Swedish slow TV hit 'The Great Moose Migration' ended Sunday night after 20 days of 24-hour live coverage. The show, called 'Den stora älgvandringen' in Swedish, began in 2019 with nearly a million people watching. In 2024, the production hit 9 million viewers on SVT Play, the streaming platform for national broadcaster SVT. By 10 p.m. local time (2000GMT) Sunday, the end of the production, the livestream's remote cameras had captured 70 moose swimming across the Ångerman River, some 300 kilometers (187 miles) northwest of Stockholm, in the annual spring migration toward summer grazing pastures. The program kicked off April 15, a week ahead of schedule due to warm weather and early moose movement. Johan Erhag, SVT's project manager for 'The Great Moose Migration,' said this year's crew will have produced 478 hours of footage — 'which we are very satisfied with,' he wrote in an email to The Associated Press Saturday evening. Figures for this year's audience were not immediately available, but Erhag said roughly 30% of the viewers tuned in from outside Sweden. The 2025 production attracted international headlines from the New York Times, CNN, Sky News and France 24, among others, following an AP story that published April 15 . 'I think AP has been a key for the success around the world this year, absolutely,' Erhag wrote hours before the final footage aired on Sunday night. The program will return to SVT next spring for its eighth season. 'The Great Moose Migration' is part of a trend that began in 2009 with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK's minute-by-minute airing of a seven-hour train trip across the southern part of the country. The slow TV style of programming has spread, with productions in the United Kingdom, China and elsewhere. The central Dutch city of Utrecht , for example, installed a ' fish doorbell ' on a river lock that lets livestream viewers alert authorities to fish being held up as they migrate to spawning grounds.
Washington Post
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
This year's 24-hour live coverage of Sweden's epic moose migration is over. It'll return in 2026
STOCKHOLM — The seventh season of Swedish slow TV hit 'The Great Moose Migration' ended Sunday night after 20 days of 24-hour live coverage. The show, called ' Den stora älgvandringen ' in Swedish, began in 2019 with nearly a million people watching. In 2024, the production hit 9 million viewers on SVT Play, the streaming platform for national broadcaster SVT. By 10 p.m. local time (2000GMT) Sunday, the end of the production, the livestream's remote cameras had captured 70 moose swimming across the Ångerman River, some 300 kilometers (187 miles) northwest of Stockholm, in the annual spring migration toward summer grazing pastures. The program kicked off April 15, a week ahead of schedule due to warm weather and early moose movement. Johan Erhag, SVT's project manager for 'The Great Moose Migration,' said this year's crew will have produced 478 hours of footage — 'which we are very satisfied with,' he wrote in an email to The Associated Press Saturday evening. Figures for this year's audience were not immediately available, but Erhag said roughly 30% of the viewers tuned in from outside Sweden. The 2025 production attracted international headlines from the New York Times, CNN, Sky News and France 24, among others, following an AP story that published April 15. 'I think AP has been a key for the success around the world this year, absolutely,' Erhag wrote hours before the final footage aired on Sunday night. The program will return to SVT next spring for its eighth season. 'The Great Moose Migration' is part of a trend that began in 2009 with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK's minute-by-minute airing of a seven-hour train trip across the southern part of the country. The slow TV style of programming has spread, with productions in the United Kingdom, China and elsewhere. The central Dutch city of Utrecht , for example, installed a ' fish doorbell ' on a river lock that lets livestream viewers alert authorities to fish being held up as they migrate to spawning grounds.
CBS News
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
"The Great Moose Migration" 2025 livestream starts in Sweden, delighting millions with slow TV
Sweden's slow TV hit " The Great Moose Migration " kicked off early this year with the livestream set to capture moose crossing a Nordic river over the next few weeks. So far, 14 moose have crossed the river in their annual spring migration, according to the count on the livestream, as of Wednesday, April 16. "The Great Moose Migration" is streamed online by the Swedish national public broadcaster, SVT. It went live on April 15 and is expected to continue until May 4. It is live 24 hours a day. The live broadcast first aired in 2019. Executive producer Johan Erhag and producer Stefan Edlund were inspired by slow TV series produced in Norway, they said in a video on the making of "The Great Moose Migration." The concept of slow TV began in Norway in 2009 with a broadcast of a train ride through a snowy scenery. It ran for seven hours, and about a quarter of the country watched for some part of the journey. That success led to multiple slow TV series. Erhag and Edlund said they visited Norway and saw how producers there installed cameras on a cliffside, capturing different types of birds in the area. "By the time we got back from Norway, we were so inspired. It was impressive. We wanted to do something like that," Edlund said. They just needed a subject. Once they learned that herds of moose cross part of the Ångerman River about 190 miles northwest of Stockholm every year, they started to set up cameras. "We wanted to share this with the population of Sweden," Erhag said. It took a few years to get SVT to take the pitch. And when they launched in 2019, the first few days went by with no moose. Every day that passed with no sightings was more and more tense, Erhag said. But finally, they showed up and walked straight into the camera shot. "We managed to convey this sense of wonder to our viewers," Erhag said. Edlund explained that "a great deal of technology is required" to broadcast something like "The Great Moose Migration." "The location is demanding, due to the river. We need to set up cameras on both sides and there are loads of cables," he said. They lay almost 12 miles of cable and position 26 remote cameras and seven night cameras. A drone is also used. The crew of up to 15 people works out of a control room, producing the show at a distance to avoid interfering with the migration. Thomas Hellum, a producer behind the train broadcast in Norway, told "CBS News Sunday Morning" in 2017 that slow TV needs to be "an unbroken timeline." "It's all the boring stuff in there, all the exciting things in there, so you as a viewer has to find out what's boring and what's interesting," he said. That's true for the moose livestream, which often shows nothing but the scenic woodlands. Nearly a million people watched the first broadcast of "The Great Moose Migration" in 2019, and in 2024, viewership hit 9 million on SVT's streaming platform. Annette Hill, a professor of media and communications at Jönköping University in Sweden, told The Associated Press that slow TV has roots in reality television but lacks the staging and therefore feels more authentic for viewers. The productions allow the audience to relax and watch the journey unfold. "It became, in a strange way, gripping because nothing catastrophic is happening, nothing spectacular is happening," she said. "But something very beautiful is happening in that minute-by-minute moment." The moose migration has attracted many fans. A Facebook group with over 78,000 members lets viewers share updates. "I would actually like to be a little fly on the wall in every household that watches the moose migration," one mega-fan, Ulla Malmgren, told the AP. "Because I think there is about a million people saying about the same thing: 'Go on! Yes, you can do it!'" The Associated Press contributed to this report.
