K-World

~ the goodbye ~

The Swedish government handed out licenses for its new digital terrestrial television platform on 25 June 1998, and one of them went to a channel then called Kunskaps-TV, Knowledge TV. Two television executives, Annie Wegelius and Maria Borelius, set the company up that year, with Investor and the Rausing family putting up the money. The pitch was an education company running on television and on the web at once, and the phrase its founders reached for was an IKEA for education. The slogan was plainer: knowledge for television viewers.

It opened fast. In the spring of 1999 the staff was twenty people, and within a few months it was a hundred. The channel, by then renamed K-World, started broadcasting on 31 October 1999, and the web portal went live the same day. Albert Bonnier arrived as editor-in-chief on 1 January 2000, having left Dagens Nyheter to do it. The programming model was borrowed openly from Discovery, with expensive documentaries and informative shows padded out by music and travel filler.

On launch night the founders expected to be available in one million households. The Swedish digital terrestrial rollout did not cooperate. By January 2000, three thousand families in the country owned a decoder that could receive the platform at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three thousand decoders ~

The channel went out on conventional cable as well, most of it still analog, where it reached a cumulative audience that peaked around 300,000. That is not nothing, and it was nowhere near enough to sell advertising against. So the revenue that did arrive came from the cable operators themselves: in 2001 the channel took in 30 million kronor in distribution fees, money paid for being carried rather than for being watched. It also redid its on-screen graphics that year, from a yellowish orange to cherry red, while the reach stayed where it was.

All of this ran its course during my last years of high school in Turkey, on ordinary Turkish broadcast television, and Swedish decoder penetration was about as far from my life as a subject can get. What makes the story readable from here is that it is not really a Swedish story. Every market had a version of the same bet in those years, and the bet was always that the delivery pipe would show up before the money ran out. I watched a lot of Turkish companies make it about broadband, and I remember how confidently the dates were quoted.

~ the receipts ~

K-World kept buying while the channel sank. On 13 November 2000 it took over Mobila Gymnasiet, a private upper secondary school with 950 students spread over four schools in three Swedish cities. In August 2001 it bought the Swiss education company Viviance, which brought 3i onto the share register. It had also, in 2000, taken Volvo on for an e-training program, and before that could begin it emerged that there was no internet connection to run it over.

By 2001 the company had worked out that television was the wrong pipe for e-learning and put the channel up for sale. The names floated as buyers were the owners of the big commercial channels, and none of them bit. The closure was announced on 5 March 2002 and the channel went dark on the 31st. Patrick Ståhle, the chief executive, said the company would concentrate on e-learning from then on. It had nine weeks left.

On 6 May 2002 the Stockholm District Court declared K-World bankrupt. Around 700 million kronor of investment had gone in, and both founders had already left. The ending is the ordinary one for the period, but the detail worth keeping is the three thousand decoders. A company hired a hundred people and commissioned documentaries for an audience that had not been built yet, and no quantity of good television was going to conjure the hardware into Swedish living rooms on schedule.

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