Walter Presents passes 100 million streams
David Farnor | On 04, Jan 2020
Walter Presents has racked up more than 100 million streams in the UK, as British appetite for international TV shows no sign of abating.
Walter Presents first launched on Channel 4 – as a featured channel on its online streaming service All 4 – almost 4 years ago with the aim of championing high quality, award-winning, foreign-language drama from around the world. The premiere on Channel 4 of its German-language launch series, Deutschland 83, quickly became the highest rating foreign-language drama in UK TV history. Since then the brand has gone from strength to strength, rolling out in the USA, Australia and a number of European countries.
However, it’s with UK audiences that it has made its biggest mark, smashing through the 100 million streams landmark over the Christmas period.
While Scandi noir has been a staple of living rooms since The Killing, though, Britons’ ongoing love affair with subtitled series has been driven but France and Belgium on Walter Presents.
With its gripping thrillers often set in stunning locations, France tops the table with its series attracting almost 18 million views – it seems there’s nothing British viewers like better than tucking into a juicy French box set. Although Belgium has fewer episodes available on the service, when ranked by country of origin it still manages second place in terms of total volume of views, thanks to dark psychological thrillers such as 13 Commandments and Tabula Rasa, and quirky crime shows such as Professor T.
France leads the pack with 17.6m views, followed by Belgium’s 11.3m, Spain’s 10.8m and the Netherlands’ 10.6m. The first Scandinavian country on the list of favourite countries of origin is Denmark, which comes in at number 5, bagging almost 11 per cent (10.6m) of total views on Walter Presents.
2019’s runaway Walter Presents hit is a Dutch series: The Adulterer quickly became the
service’s most popular series of 2019 after launching in April. Outside of Europe the most popular titles have come from South America and Brazil in particular.
The first series of Deutschland 83 cold war spy thriller has been the most popular offering among 16 to 24-year-olds, with hit Spanish prison show Locked Up a close second and Danish vampire series, Heartless, third. And the fastest binge-watch by British viewers? That’s Polish thriller The Border.
Curator of Walter Presents – and the man whom the service was named after – Walter Iuzzolino says: “I always knew British audiences would appreciate great drama regardless of where in the world it originates from and I also knew they wouldn’t be frightened by subtitles. But, if I’m honest, even I could never have dreamed the British would have embraced foreign-language drama quite as eagerly as they have done.”